by Dr. David McGrogan, Daily Sceptic:
We live in an age that is gesturing towards global government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is something which perfectly respectable politicians, academics, policymakers and UN officials routinely talk about. What is crystallising is not exactly a single world Government, but rather a complicated mixture of aligned institutions, organisations, networks, systems and fora which has sometimes been given the fancy name of a ‘bricolage’ by international relations theorists. There is no centre, but rather a vast and nebulous conglomeration.
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This does not mean, though, that global government (or ‘global governance’, as it is more commonly known) is emerging organically. It is being purposively directed. Again, this is no conspiracy theory; it is something that the people involved openly discuss – they hide their plans in perfectly plain sight. And this has been going on for a long time. In the early 1990s, when the Cold War had drawn to a close, the UN convened something called the Commission on Global Governance, which released a final report – called ‘Our Global Neighbourhood‘ – in 1995. It makes for fascinating reading as a kind of ‘playbook’ for what has followed in the field in the 30 years since – establishing as it does a clear rhetorical and argumentative pattern in favour of the global governance project that is repeated to this day.
The basic idea is as follows. In the olden days, when “faith in the ability of Governments to protect citizens and improve their lives was strong”, it was fine for the nation-state to be ‘dominant’. But now the world economy is integrated, the global capital market has vastly expanded, there has been extraordinary industrial and agricultural growth and there has been a huge population explosion. Ours is therefore a “more crowded, interdependent world with finite resources”. And this means we need “a new vision for humanity” which will “galvanise people everywhere to achieve higher levels of cooperation in areas of common concern and shared destiny” (these “areas of common concern” being “human rights, equity, democracy, meeting basic material needs, environmental protection, and demilitarisation”). We need, in short, “an agreed global framework for actions and policies to be carried out at appropriate levels” and a “multifaceted strategy for global governance”.
This is not difficult reasoning to parse. The central argument can be summarised as follows: global governance is necessary because the world is globalising, and that brings with it global problems that need solving collectively. And the logic must be impeccable in the minds of those who are engaged in the global governance project, because what they say has remained essentially the same ever since. Hence, if we fast forward from 1995 to 2024, we find world leaders finalising a revised draft of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s proposed ‘Pact for the Future’, a memorandum of guiding principles for global governance which will be the culmination of his ‘Our Common Agenda‘ project, launched in 2021. While there is a bit more meat on the bone in this document than there may have been in Our Global Neighbourhood in terms of policy, we see a more-or-less identical argument playing out.
So, once again, we are reminded in this document that we live in “a time of profound global transformation” in which we face challenges that are “deeply interconnected” and “far exceed the capacity of any single state alone”. Since our problems can “only be addressed collectively” we therefore need “strong and sustained international cooperation guided by trust and solidarity” – stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. Even the substantive concerns at the heart of the ‘Pact for the Future’ are largely unchanged from those cited in ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’: human rights, equity, poverty and sustainable development, the environment, peace and security – the familiar litany. The only thing that has really changed is that in 2024 there has been layered on top a tone of alarmism: “we are confronted by a growing range of catastrophic and existential risks”, the reader is told, “and if we do not change course, we risk tipping irreversibly into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown”. Better get the washing in, then.
To return to my summary from earlier on, the picture being painted by ‘Our Common Agenda’ and the ‘Pact for the Future’ is then just a slightly more elaborate copy of what was sketched out in ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’: globalisation causes certain problems to emerge that have to be governed globally, and therefore we need, so to speak, to be globally governed. And this is presented as a fait accompli; it is indeed “common sense”, as the Secretary-General calls it in ‘Our Common Agenda’. Governing globally is necessary because there are global problems, and that is that – how could one imagine things could be otherwise?
This all brings to mind Michel Foucault’s account of the emergence of the state in early modernity. Foucault describes that emergence as being, in essence, an epistemological or metaphysical phenomenon rather than a political or social one. For the medieval mind, the world’s significance was spiritual – it was a staging post before Rapture, and what mattered was salvation. The world was therefore not so much an empirical phenomenon as a theological one – it was governed not by physics but by “signs, prodigies, marvels and monstrosities that were so many threats of chastisement, promises of salvation, or marks of election”. It was not something to be altered, but was rather a “system of obedience” to God’s will.
