Global Governance: Today's Historical Struggle

The idea that our understanding of the world and its history is full of lies, errors and uncertainty is not something we are disposed to consider. We take most of our reality on trust. In practice this rarely lets us down at any single moment. Most of the doubtful reality is not part of our daily lives, but rather is enmeshed in the shared world that frames our lives. Much of it never touches most of us, so if it is untrue we find out after the event and can usually not be that concerned. The world we know of through shared media is frequently a manipulated version of a partial truth. Ownership of the reality frames we share, is what advertising and propaganda are about. Just as this control enables brewer's waste to be sold as Marmite, so it enables corporate capitalism to shape our futures. It enables the leaders of nation states to squander on the military and form alliances to advance their favoured systems to control the world.

So used to are we to thinking of ourselves in terms of our nations that we are blind to the limits of meaning of nation. In the 500 years since navigators sailed around the world we have come to understand the earth as a finite space with millions of interconnected systems describing all the flows and processes that are the living planet. This big world is watched by countless satellites, while other satellites bounce information, instantly linking distant friends and the spokes of global corporations.

As the impact of humans upon the earth, its life and its stability grows greater, so too does the need to understand our shared predicament, not as nations, but as citizens of the world. For this to have meaning though, the world needs some system of government that is appropriate and legitimate. To some extent there is a system of global governance, but much of it is neither apropriate nor legitimate. It consists of a hotch potch of treaties, institutions and trade agreements that are the product of military, financial and industrial coercion as much as of genuine mutual interest. This global government is of course dominated by the United States who are reluctant to compromise with the competing powers emerging in China, India and Russia. Each of these powers is ultimately willing to use the threat of armed force to express their independence and perceived national interest. It is though, the smaller nations that are constantly made vassal to the greater powers and collectively they constitute an ill served interest, frequently vulnerable to poverty and war.

The Irish economist Richard Douthwaite suggested that climate change and the global inequality of nations could be addressed by creating a global trading currency based on carbon emission rights allocated to nations on a per head of population basis. This would effectively be a one off subsidy to the poor, but would have the sustainable benefit of replacing reserve currencies with a fit for purpose trading currency. This is probably the first step towards a more legitimate world government system. Equally there is a need to see how laws and treaties need to change such that each country can best adapt to become more equitable and sustainable, while retaining as much power over their cultural and linguistic diversity as is compatible with our shared interests.

Meanwhile, however, the nations of the earth continue to struggle. The US and its allies in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, aggressively push a US centric model of globalisation that is frequently backed by military might. Around the world, the western cultural, financial, media and academic models define people into situational stereotypes that limit expression and frequently mock culture and religion. The opposition to this arrogant dominance becomes an opposition to global government and global systems.

This leads us to our current position. Amid the struggle to create a global system of governance, we live out our daily lives. Our news of this struggle is not presented for what it is, but as a confusion of dispersed events, each packaged for our understanding. Collectively these packaged stories of our time describe the frame in which we understand our lives and the lives of others. As the struggle deepens and becomes more intense, the stories we are told through which to understand the world and its events become more and more enmeshed in lies and half truths. Rather than this creating a call for better global governance, the effect on most of us is a desire to retreat to the safety of nationalism or religion: shared institutions we believe once worked for us.