Building a Global Community

World unification is as much a social task as it is political—and both are necessary for the full realization of its potential. In Fed. 17, social cosmopolitanism was envisioned as the first step along the path to world unity, and as a prerequisite for the political part of the process. This paper shall dive into the creation of a global community—which entails a fundamental shift in humanity’s allegiance from national identities to humanity and the world. Despite considerable scepticism about the prospects of such an identity, there are several avenues for realizing the social part of world unity.

The main reason why a strong sense of global community does not exist at present is nationalism and its resulting alienation (Fed. 20). It should not be a major challenge to create global solidarity provided that nations do not get in the way. The focus, therefore, should be on how to supersede the divisions of nationalism; once this is done global community will easily follow. And if all the education systems in the world were scrubbed of their nationalistic propaganda and replaced with a message of unity, and if every child were told to relate to all humans instead of being loyal to one nation, then within a generation we will have a global community as strong as that seen for nations. The key to superseding nationalism, then, is overcoming nationalism’s control over the universal indoctrination of human beings. Spreading awareness and public campaigns on worldist and cosmopolitan themes are key to the initial stage of building a global community, so people first realize that there is an alternative to nationalism.

The superseding of nationalism presents a formidable challenge in that it currently enjoys universal consensus and support as the organizing principle of the world. Sceptics see it as so fundamental to us today that they think it is futile to attempt to move beyond it. But let us not forget two considerations: one, that universal support is not justification; and two, that such widely accepted principles have been successfully challenged and overcome in the past when they were found incompatible with the values of society. There was a time when slavery or the denial of voting rights to women was considered standard and natural. Human political institutions can by no means be assumed to be timeless constants. They are our own constructs that can be replaced.

Despite this, sceptics would counter that underlying the divisions of our world is a natural and eternal tendency of humans to behave tribally, and that world unity nevertheless remains unachievable. I would be very sceptical myself of such claims about the universality of a human behaviour—again, we have witnessed seemingly unshakeable behaviours being challenged. Patriarchy was once assumed to be the natural state of things. Religion was once considered an ingrained feature of humans. Excluding animal products from one’s diet once seemed unfeasible. Yet feminism, atheism, and veganism have successfully contested these beliefs. The only limitation has been that each of these remains limited to support from some sections of the population, while facing strong opposition from others. World unity cannot afford to become a fringe movement—it needs to have the broadest appeal.

It is of paramount importance for initiatives to create a global community to be all-inclusive and universal in character, and not to be merely an interest group joining transnationally. An alliance of, say, big businesses or socialists cannot be classified as working for true global community. World unity means a lot more than international association; it is about association cutting across every single division of humanity. It is fundamentally universal in nature, including every single human being, and this must be essential to any efforts to bring it about. That is also why it does not have to be ideological beyond worldism—the core issue being world integration and government.

Some theorists argue that a global community requires a shared universal standard of values to provide a moral foundation to the union. There is then a need for all humans to work together and establish this consensus. A number of such initiatives do take place in the present, promoting exchanges of ideas between different groups (like cultures or religions), but these operate under a pluralist framework based on appreciating differences. This must give way to a unity-based approach focused on building consensus and identifying common ground.

I encountered this phrase in a text sceptical about the prospects of world community: “Communication does not produce community.” But it does! The more people interact across the boundaries of identity groups, the more connection, empathy, and bonding is fostered between them. Exposure to ‘other’ cultures or ideas broadens one’s mind beyond the confines of one’s own indoctrination. Having known a person or visited a place strengthens ties in a way that the imagined construct of national identity cannot emulate. The central component of any effort towards global community must be to promote interactions across identities but in a manner that does not reinforce them further, be they social, business, political or other types.

And these global interactions are already quite well-established and growing even further. In the long run, spanning all human history, globalization can be seen as analogous to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The world has been, and is only going to continue, tending naturally towards more intermixing and homogeneity; for there to be more and more separation is implausible. Isolationist nationalists may wield a lot of clout from time to time in present politics, but they are merely trying to hold on to the past. From tribes of hunter-gatherers we have made it to the United Nations, and forward we shall go towards more unification.

Driving this shift towards global unification, among other factors, is a tremendous improvement in communication technology. In the 21st century, the internet has enabled for the first time the existence of a truly global space for interaction—by eliminating the distance/time factor in communications and being unhindered by national borders. Communication has historically been central to political consolidation—as Benedict Anderson argued, the establishment of nations owes much to the development of the printing press. With the advances of recent decades, conditions are ripe for a transformative shift towards global unity. As Derek Heater noted, the computer is to the global identity what a flag is to a national identity.

Sceptics counter that notwithstanding such advances, these trends would not culminate in global unity; they see humans as too fundamentally different to form a unified community. But there is important distinction to be made between meaningful differences and differences merely on the basis of identity (Fed. 13). Communitarianism often assumes that differences in identity mean differences in everything, in line with its tendency to attribute supreme significance to identity groups over human lives. But of course people across humanity can think alike and have similar interests across identity boundaries. As with existing polities, non-identity differences can be reconciled enough to allow unified governance, while identity divisions are to be superseded.

I am in agreement with the sceptics in seeing community as necessary for consolidating a state and for government. Yet even as they overemphasize the divisions in the world to oppose world government, they also exaggerate the unity of nations. National identities are seen as being primordial and natural, and as being a homogeneous and tight-knit community of people with unified interests. Most states of today do not fit into this idealized view of a nation-state—and neither must the world to function as a united polity.

Those who doubt the prospects of world community assert that it would be more feeble than national identities today, and could not evoke sufficiently strong identification to support a world government. By contrast I would say that it is nationalism which is too demanding and artificial to appeal to people. It is far simpler to ask someone to ‘care for’ everyone by appealing to universal morals and human nature, than to get someone to favour a subset of humanity and get them to believe highly exaggerated myths about a unified national culture, a shared history and destiny, and about all compatriots being ‘like us’ but all others being ‘foreign’. A global identity is a much more reasonable construct for people to relate to. We know that universal indoctrination has already made the more difficult of these possible—the second should follow more easily. Every interaction, every bond that cuts across identities is contributing towards world community.

Thinkers of global governance have extensively focused on the role and potential of civil society and non-governmental organizations in mitigating some of the problems with the national system. But civil society can also facilitate global unity. For example, we could have an association of like-minded worldists which transcends nations and advocates global unification. It would probably be best to have several of these with different visions of world government, to promote a healthy discourse and also guard against future one-party dominance. During the second stage of establishment (Fed. 17), these could develop into fully-fledged political parties. Some of them could compete in national politics themselves and drive policy reforms, while others could be radical enough to shun nations altogether in their advocacy for world government.

Perhaps another way to build support for global unification is to spread awareness about the effects of nationalism itself. Many people today are too insulated from the horrors of nationalism to see the need for world government, living in some of the more stable and prosperous parts of the world and with limited exposure to the perils nationalism has brought in the past or to other areas. I suggest establishing ‘Museums of Nationalism’ across the globe, depicting the raw, brutal nature of history under it without any filtering; releasing all the graphic footage of conflicts across the globe which is withheld by the media; and more education on nationalist outcomes like genocide and war. And then people will see that whatever we have today is not because of nationalism, but despite it.

This is necessary because a true global identification is tricky to realize while national allegiance continues—even as previous thinkers on world government have sought to reconcile the two. To build a sufficiently strong global community, people need to actively shun nationalism and distance them from it. Ideologically speaking, a world identity is fundamentally different from the exclusive nature of nations and other identity groups (Fed. 14). It is not merely a larger group but the universal group.

But many are sceptical of the premise of superseding group allegiances in world unity, arguing that in practice these will continue to divide human society and hinder unified governance of the world. But even nation-states faced and continue to face this issue with sub-national identity groups. Nationalism has managed, in most parts of the world, to assimilate or consolidate authority over sub-national identities to an extent enough for state formation. Even as these often remain salient in politics, there is typically enough national-level association to allow governance. Although indeed there were ample cases where nationalists engaged in strong suppression, even to the point of genocide, against sub-groups, much of this can be attributed to ‘othering’ and the desire for domination, both of which are antithetical to the vision of world unity (Fed. 14).

This scepticism also comes from what I call the ‘vicious cycle’ of nationalist alienation: while the world’s population does not identify with a global community there can be no world government; but while the world is divided politically into nations (no world government), humanity lacks a strong binding factor to create that community. For the sceptics this makes world government appear hopelessly impractical – both seem to be pre-requisites of each other. In this condition there is then a need to start a positive feedback loop, where both political and social unity build on each other, with only an initial burst of ‘cosmopolitanism’ needed to kick-start the process.

In considering a global community (often referred to as ‘demos’ in the literature) as a complete pre-requisite for world government, without which political unification is utterly ruled out, the reverse effects of political organization upon social identity is ignored. This is also to ignore the whole history of the establishment of the national system. It is no coincidence that nations arose along the boundaries of pre-existing states almost everywhere in the world during the nation-building process. First came political integration under the kingdoms and empires of old, without a pre-existing identity, and this produced enough homogeneity that nationalists could appeal to that commonality. Standardization, assimilation, and communication created through political changes in many cases not only preceded but was integral to the creation of a common identity. Thus, with the existence of this reverse process, a positive feedback loop can indeed be created for political and social unification.

Even after a state is established, its political organization continues to strongly affect identities within it. A lack of political status or existence for nations does much to break down the identity and its social salience, being overshadowed by the actual political organization. Being a nationalist in a world union without nations is like calling oneself a Soviet or Holy Roman in the present. One may point out that separatist nationalist movements still exist despite a lack of political recognition, but the most successfully mobilized ones typically have an associated territorial or administrative boundary which they appeal to. When an identity does not have an associated coherent political boundary but is rather hindered by them, it will more likely struggle to mobilize politically as a unified bloc.

Some theorists feel that once the prerequisites for world government, here meaning global community, are achieved then a world government will not be needed. While this has already been discussed and refuted in Fed. 18, let me focus here specifically on world community. In a scenario where people identify with the whole of humanity but the political divisions of nations remain, we would hardly be at a point where no further progress towards world government is needed. At this stage, nations will become even less effective at acting in the human interest and will be widely seen as so. This is when, as envisioned in Fed. 17, people will demand change from the dysfunctional national system and proceed to the next, political stage.

And as for political action, the effort to bring about global community can take advantage of the eventual backlash to the recent upsurge in populist nationalism worldwide. The increasingly nationalistic actions of governments are plunging us into, and exacerbating many existing, crises. And the impacts of these are widely being felt, but so far merely being rationalized into the nationalist narrative. So far this surge shows no significant sign of subsiding at the global level, but it is bound to come to an end in the long run. Sooner or later there will arise widespread dissatisfaction with this brand of populist-nationalist politics, and the time shall be ripe for presenting an alternative to divisiveness with world government and unity.

Much as nationalists and identitarians may try to highlight the divisions between humans, humanity is fundamentally tied together at a depth that the imagined, minimal differences of identity cannot overcome. Sceptics of world government overemphasize cleavages such as religion and language, but these should be seen against a backdrop where humanity has everything in common—from having two eyes and a nose, to having languages at all, to having similar mental processes and behaviours, and so on. The differences of identity are human constructs and can just as well be undone by humans. But in nature, we are all the same.

We need to stop pretending to be different.