Abstract
The idea of a world state became a focal point of discussions during WWII. The realists were opposed to world constitutionalism, but they shared the sense of acute importance of political integration on a global scale. They advocated gradual integration, contrasting the existing communities with a future world state. Compared to the 1940s discussions, Wendt’s 2003 scenario is an improvement because it provides a dynamic account of community formation. Here I argue, however, that Wendt’s story about “struggle for recognition” is instructive, but its epistemological and ontological status is unclear. I stress the importance of a comprehensive agenda, including the consequences of uneven economic growth, contradictions of the world economy, ecological crises, space expansionism, nuclear weapons, etc. and sketch out a generic process-ontological perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
This is an estimate given by Professor Kai-Uwe Schrogl—the President of the International Institute of Space Law—in his “Inaugural Astropolitics BISA Working Group” first annual lecture given remotely on 20 February 2023.
- 2.
It is also possible that life on Earth originates elsewhere. The idea that life can be distributed across (parts of) the universe, or at least from planet to planet within a solar system, is called panspermia.
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- 4.
This formulation looks open-ended, but in a transcript of a presentation Wendt (2015) specifies his idea of a world state in a fairly conventional and unambitious way that fails to address most real issues: “I’m only talking about sovereignty over violence, not education policy, taxation, culture, or the vast majority of things governments do on a day-to-day basis. All of those issues might remain privatised to separate countries and as such a world state in my view might be a quite minimalist entity focusing just on the issue of violence, and not a gigantic bureaucracy of territorial states we have today. Second, even in the area of organized violence a world state might be quite decentralised in practice, with each current state retaining its own armed forces, much like in the U.S. each of the 50 states has its own state and local police forces, national guard, and so on. It might help to have a UN army, but I don’t see this as essential to the idea of a world state. All that is essential is that the authority to use violence and the power to back up that authority no longer be private—a private unilateral right of the today’s 190 states—but a collective right of the whole. So ‘no national level of violence without UN authorization’ might be a slogan”.
- 5.
In a footnote, Wendt (1999, pp. 532–533, fn 34) qualifies this closedness: “Organisms may die before they reach maturity, and in international politics one can imagine various exogenous shocks that could prevent world state formation—an asteroid impact, plague, ecological collapse, and so on. All real-world systems are partially open systems and thus vulnerable to disruption. On the other hand, a constitutive feature of any teleological system is that it restricts the flow of energy across its boundaries, enabling it within limits to determine for itself which stimuli it will respond to [...]. Sometimes shocks will overwhelm a system and it will collapse, but in their absence a normal teleological system will indeed inevitably finish its development”. Moreover, at the end of his essay, Wendt (p. 528) stresses that the end-point does not mean the end of all history: “[O]nce a world state has emerged those struggles will be domesticated by enforceable law, and so for purposes of state formation will be no longer important. Rather than a complete end of history, therefore, it might be better to say that a world state would be the end of just one kind of history. Even if one telos is over, another would be just beginning”.
- 6.
Many practical explanations in open systems take the form of specifying causes as Insufficient but Non-redundant elements of a complex which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient for the production of a result (so-called INUS-conditions; Mackie, 1974). A number of other INUS-conditions are involved in generating any outcome. What we single out as the cause depends largely on our practical capacities and expectations of normality. In the social world, the relational and processual components that form these INUS-conditions are themselves historical and changeable (for example, the historical constitution of the category of the “economy”). It is also worth noting that the problem with the INUS-scheme is that it makes it difficult to analyse systematically and theoretically how the structure of a field or the organisation of an environment may be the cause of what happens within it, or how these structures and organisations may evolve. A field-theoretical account can help to explain, though only to a degree, the movement of the whole.
- 7.
To these one should add the European ideas of freedom and equality came to a significant degree from the outside, emerging from encounters with others such as American “indians”. David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021, chs 2 and 11) stress the role of actual encounters especially with indigenous Americans and their often highly critical opinions about European societies, although, for instance, Lahontan’s influential “Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled” (1703) added and changed all kinds of things and the claims of the Iroquoian-speaking chief Kandiaronk were exaggerated, involving romantisation of his own society. At any rate, the mere possibility of taking critical distance from the European hierarchies and class systems made a big difference in the context where books were mass-produced for markets and literacy was becoming increasingly widespread.
- 8.
As Eva Erman (2019) points out, in the political theoretical literature, the question of whether global democracy requires a world state has with few exceptions been answered with an unequivocal “No”. A world state, it is typically argued, is neither feasible nor desirable. Erman distinguishes between different moments of democratic processes and their different functions and argues that global democracy requires some stateness, especially supranational legislative entities and perhaps supranational judicial entities but not necessarily supranational executive entities. Chapters 11 and 12 can be read as comments on this idea: in Chap. 11 I argue for a combination of different democratic principles in a specific context of a functionally differentiated of system of governance, and in Chap. 12 that a world parliament can have an important function with regard to international and cosmopolitan law without being a “sovereign” legislator.
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Patomäki, H. (2023). Emergence of World Statehood: A Processual and Open-Ended Account. In: World Statehood. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32305-8_10
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