Thinking global brings a world of problems

09-27-2009 • Telegraph

The idea of global governance is meaningless without mechanisms to enforce it, so what are we talking about here? World government? A system of laws and policing which would be beyond the reach of the electorates of individual countries, and therefore have no direct democratic accountability to the peoples of those nations? Even assuming that such institutions did not take on a self-justifying life of their own – which history teaches us is almost inevitable – and that they remained fastidiously responsive to the heads of national governments, they would still be, by definition, supranational. In other words, their function would be precisely to ignore those needs and interests of individual countries which might endanger the welfare of the larger entity. And the welfare of that larger entity would be judged by – what?