Why Reforming the National Order is Not the Solution

Very few people so far have considered world government as a way forward for humanity. Far more people, though, have discussed reforms to the nation-based world order—a very active discourse that continues daily. This leads to the natural question: Why bother with world government at all, and why not try and improve the national system? Humanity in 1945 picked the latter path with the United Nations, and is yet to find a satisfactory arrangement. While almost everyone agrees that the present national system needs to change, no one is able to agree on the change itself. Visions for international reform are very divergent, once again driven by national self-interest. The very simple answer, though, is: Nationalism itself is the problem. This is the realization that has so far evaded humanity, and upon which we can start to consider the far greater possibilities that lie beyond nationalism.

One of the key reasons why reforms to the national system fall short is that often seem to expect the national actors to behave contrary to their very nature, as realists have pointed out. Thinkers have long come up with proposals that assume either too much benevolence on the part of nations, or that weak and unenforceable mechanisms will suffice to mitigate their misbehaviour. Merely limiting their violent tendencies or restraining their ability to create trouble would not resolve the underlying problems of hostility, alienation, and selfishness even if these measures are implemented to the best. Nation-states are like a herd of angry bulls, and fixes like tying them or cutting off their horns will not make them any more cooperative or united. The need is instead to domesticate and tame them and bend them to the greater good of humanity.

Proposals for reforming the international system also fall short in the depth to which they address the deep-seated divisions between nations. Many of them have concentrated predominantly on the avoidance of war, with little ambition to build deeper connections between humans or improve the governance of the world. Others focus solely on international cooperation on one specific issue, such as the environment, nuclear weapons, or artificial intelligence, leaving all the other wounds open. Yet even if such ideas manage to avoid a catastrophe, the underlying hostility and division of humanity still represents a major loss compared to what unity could bring us. We should not content ourselves merely with suppressing violent conflict or averting a disaster, but should strive towards addressing their root cause in identity-based divisions. After all, there is so much more to be done in global governance besides these issues.

The conservative idealism of national reform relies too heavily on more cooperation between nations. Yet if cooperation by itself would work to manage humanity’s political affairs, why would we need government at all? Cooperation by itself is insufficient, and we cannot depend solely on it for global governance (No. 28). There is no point in creating more institutions or platforms for nations to cooperate, since they just don’t want to on so many issues. Under nationalism, the world order is not deficient in opportunities for cooperation. This is exactly how the nations of the world collectively want it to be—if they wanted to cooperate more they would simply do so themselves. As such, proposals for national reform which envision creating more international bodies or strengthening their mandate are likely to fall short of their aims.

The experience of international relations has also shown that it is insufficient to depend on international norms and rules as long as there is no supranational authority to enforce them. Because it is nations themselves which are enforcing those rules, they are being judges in their own case—which renders the rules useless, mere tools of national interest. The condition is like a Lockean state of nature, where the enforcement of norms is improper and highly hypocritical. National interest immediately trumps any attempts at creating such well-intentioned norms, such as disarmament or free trade. Most nations simply signal a hollow commitment to these principles only to flagrantly violate them in practice.

And alas for the dreams of many democratic nationalist reformers, I must also say what many realists have long considered obvious: that there is no point in expecting a change away from anarchy to be driven by the actions of a few benevolent nations. For many recent decades some nations have tried to claim for themselves the mantle of moral righteousness and used it to justify their actions in the international sphere, some of which have arguably been highly immoral themselves. It is becoming more and more obvious that behind this moralizing, there has always been shameless self-interest. Moreover, the power dynamics between nations are always changing; one cannot expect a benevolent nation to be in a powerful position long enough to drive deep reform. Ultimately it boils down to the same point—all nations are selfish, none of them is benevolent, and they cannot be trusted to act for the welfare of the world.

Moreover national sovereignty is also a hindrance to the domestic political reforms that many thinkers would like to see. Plenty of well-meaning people around the world would like to see a world where everyone has access to a well-functioning government, good public services, the rule of law, and no corruption. Yet suboptimal regimes are able to hide behind national self-determination, facing little pressure from a subdued small population or people in the rest of the world. And efforts by other nations to intervene have not found success either, instead being pursuits of geopolitical self-interest. For these visions of seemingly ‘internal’ change to be realized, they must be universalized; only then can one government be held accountable to all of humanity.

The major obstacle for supranational authority, and hence world government, is national sovereignty. So many of the reforms that liberal internationalists advocate instead of world government are actually along the way to it, where they involve breaching or limiting sovereignty. For example, if there is to be a global mechanism to settle international disputes peacefully, or stronger international law, then these must be binding on nations which needs them to give up some sovereignty. And when more and more national reforms are enacted that abrogate sovereignty, it becomes possible that these will snowball into some form of global authority.

Much of the theorizing about the desirability of nations has come from thinkers who see all the countries as if they were like the cocoons of a few ‘good’ nations, with well-established institutions and aligned to a strong national identity. They see nations as being expressions of group self-determination, and one uniform and united culture and society. Yet alas, most of the world’s population is not in such a situation. Real nations seldom follow this template; they have been mainly a product of historical coincidence, of political events that shaped their form. In fact, many states have boundaries that are very arbitrary, even just straight lines drawn on a map. Others have a mixed of deeply divided identity groups, or majoritarian domination by one. Yet others have demographics that have shifted considerably over time. And what about all the countries with entrenched tyrannical governments, or those witnessing internal conflict, or the ‘failed states’ which can not even ensure the basics of life for people? For most of the world, the reality does not match the theoretical, romanticised concept of the nation.

The ideal nation as presupposed by nationalist worldviews would be one that is full of clones, where group identity and homogeneity supersedes all individuality (No. 13). Paradoxically, that is exactly what nationalists accuse a world government of aiming to do. The real world that we live in is not inhabited by homogenized clones; it is a world of individual human beings where the variety spans so much more than the imaginary distinction of nationality. Yet as nationalism would have it, nationality is the main division around which the world is to be organized, and there is little concern for individual differences of any other kind (No. 13).

This raises an objection to defenders of the national system: what makes nations so special that should be preserved at the expense of everything else? And what gives them the exclusive legitimacy to be the only unit of humans’ political representation? After all, historically they were also established through force and political coincidence, and continue to be sustained by force and indoctrination. And they are only a transient rather than permanent feature of humanity’s political existence over the centuries. As raised in No. 13, nationalists must justify why nations should be preferred over any of the other divisions amongst humanity.

If the rationale behind maintaining the national order is to preserve group subjectivity and diversity/rights, then the present national boundaries are far from optimal for this purpose. The pursuit of this ideal would require a reorganization of the world into different states by cultural or identity groups. Yet this cannot be implemented in the system of sovereign nations, based on static boundaries that they would not voluntarily change given the territorial attachment of nationalism. Such a vision first requires some kind of world government or authority, which could then restructure political boundaries to support group rights. Thus, paradoxically, even supporters of more subjectivity rather than unity would find themselves confronted with the need for global authority.

Similarly, the pluralist vision of empowering identity groups as separate and equal entities, and bringing them to a shared consensus through voluntary agreement and deliberation, is bound to fail while subjective relativism continues to be entertained. There is no scope for any ‘moral dialogue’ or shared values when any group can at will dismiss concepts and norms as being inapplicable to them on grounds of group autonomy and subjectivity. Common ground can only be found when all humans are in a common group and only one universal consensus needs to be found, not between hundreds of uncompromising but also dismissive subsets. Hence even pluralism’s lofty goal of a consensus across groups can only be achieved if the groups themselves do not stand in the way.

I do not consider the world under nation-states to be in a dystopian condition, or in a sort of Hobbesian state of nature, or subscribe to any fixed descriptive theory about the nature of the national system. I only consider it far worse than things could be. The discipline of international relations has long been tussling over the nature of the state system, yet these lengthy academic debates about its nature have not brought any substantial change. Rather than get stuck in endless descriptive and methodological debates, all we need to do is accept that the system is inadequate and change it.

And let me not be misunderstood—any reforms that are or can be made to the national system should indeed be pursued and welcomed. Something is better than nothing, and any improvement is worth pursuing on purely utilitarian grounds. Yet we must not stop exploring the potential of deeper, more fundamental change that can take us beyond the constraints of a national system. Fixes to the nationalist order are at best to be considered a transitional improvement, while we must continue strive towards the best we can have in full unity. There is no point in changing the wheels of a horse-drawn carriage, trying to make it go faster, when we could have jet planes instead.

As opposed to a bottom-up world order which has governed humanity up to the present, a world government shall be the first top-down organization of humanity. Advocates of a divided world and others in general have long touted the benefits of bottom-up models, appealing to notions of autonomy, participation, and legitimacy amongst others. Such concepts were useful at a historical stage when humans were isolated from each other, and built connections and communities that gradually grew in scope. Even most of the prevailing political theories of the state are built on a view of individuals coming together to constitute a government among themselves, despite this hardly having been the case in history. Yet in the recent past, humanity has undergone an unprecedented shift towards unification. We have reached a stage where the world as a whole has taken on a meaning beyond just an aggregate of isolated groups.

The political events of the 20^th century are a stark enough reminder of what happens when politics fails to keep up with technological and scientific developments. Faced with a world so advanced from what it was built for, the national system is quite literally running on ‘extended warranty.’ It is simply not appropriate for an era of global challenges and opportunities. It is also so conceptually outdated that supporting it now is like believing in a flat earth—a once-plausible notion given the context of the time but now merely wishful thinking amidst a vastly different reality. And there is no need for us to continue holding on to this system when we have an alternative available.

I consider nationalism now to be an indefensible position, following all the ruin it has brought to humanity and all the potential it has wasted. Perhaps it could have been acceptable at a time when it replaced its even worse predecessors or when there was no alternative. Now when both are not the case, to uphold nationalism is to support some of the greatest atrocities of the world—including nuclear bombings, genocides, and massacres. It is to defend a system where killing other humans is prioritized over alleviating disease and hunger. It is to uphold a state where humans are so alienated from one another that global challenges find no resolution. It is also to reject a better future for humanity in favour of the present and past.

Despite that there remain many who actually consider this sorry state of affairs under nations to be desirable, and advocate only minor mitigations within this. They marvel at structures like the UN and overstate the successes of international cooperation, ignoring the many core failures they have come to take as given. They consider world government to be unnecessary, because nations are already good enough, or will fix whatever problems remain. I say that humanity deserves better than this, and that we must not give up while there is so much to be fixed. The problem with the national system is not just that it has serious deficiencies, but also that these are essential to its nature and cannot be resolved within it. There is no point placing one’s hopes in a faith of eventual national benevolence when we can cut straight to the problem.

I conclude by taking a radically sceptical view of proposals for national reform—that these have actually caused more ‘harm’ than good. By providing people with promises of a better world under limited reforms, they have hindered progress and even consideration of more ambitious proposals like world government. For a long time, whenever the situation of humanity has required bold political action, people have fallen back on illusions that the troubles of humanity can be resolved within the national order. The failure to advance world government in the 1940s (No. 18) owes much to the push for other initiatives like the United Nations, which were much more palatable to the nationalist sympathies of people and leaders. And this failure has already had a tremendous opportunity cost in the lost potential of many decades. I do not doubt the good intentions behind suggestions for reforming the national system, but let us not shy away from doing our best.