Accelerating democratic global state formation

Introduction

The emergence of hierarchies and the expansion of the size of polities have been important aspects of human socio-cultural evolution ¹ since the beginnings of sedentism in the Mesolithic Age. In the long term, polities have become larger and socially structured hierarchies have emerged within and between polities. At the same time, there have been cycles of the rise and fall of large polities. This is well known as the rise and fall of empires, but chiefdoms and modern hegemons have also risen and fallen.

All world-systems ² contain multiple polities ³ that importantly interact with one another, and all hierarchical world-systems exhibit a cycle of rise and fall in which a powerful polity emerges and then declines. The modern Europe-centred system also exhibits such a cycle, but it has proved exceptionally resistant to the formation of core-wide empires. Rather, there has been a series of hegemonic core states that have risen and declined: the Dutch in the 17th century, the British in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th century (Wallerstein, 1984). The evolution of global governance by means of hegemony displays a pattern in which the hegemon has become larger and larger relative to the size of the whole system. Also the originally European interstate system expanded to include the whole globe because of the waves of decolonization of the colonial empires. And, since the Napoleonic Wars, international political organizations have emerged and become more important. Thus the long-term trend, despite cyclical downturns caused by hegemonic declines, has been in the direction of global state formation, though that has not yet happened. But the culmination of this trend may take a very long time. The current world historical situation is one in which the evolution of global governance by means of hegemony seems to have hit a wall because there are no existing single states large enough to replace the declining U.S., and yet the forces that might lead to further global state formation seem relatively weak at present (Chase-Dunn et al., 2011). This article examines the factors that could possibly speed up global state formation in the next few decades by considering the main world historical causes of political integration in the past and by specifying the particularities of the current conjuncture in world historical perspective.

What do we mean by the term ‘state’? A state is a type of polity, so it is a spatially bounded realm of sovereign authority. States differ from chiefdoms because they are typically larger in both population and territorial size, and they have specialized institutions of regional control such as dedicated bureaucratic organizations and full-time or dedicated bodies of armed men (which chiefdoms do not). The authors are also partial to Max Weber’s definition of a state as holding a monopoly of legitimate violence, at least in theory. ⁴ By these definitions a comparison of the internal power of states one to another can be made.

Each state in an interpolity system has two faces of power – internal and external. Its external power is relative to the other states with which it is interacting, typically indicated by its military and economic capabilities. Internal state strength is the power of the government as an organization vis-à-vis internal groups that might resist or obstruct state regulation and activity. This is the kind of state strength that will be mainly considering here in this article because it is possible to compare national states with a hypothetical global state that would only have internal state strength. Charles Tilly’s (2007) text about democracy, for example, clearly lays out the issues involved in analysing internal state strength.

Archaeologists and anthropologists distinguish between primary (or pristine) state formation and secondary state formation. Secondary state formation occurs when a stateless polity that is in interaction with one or more already-existing states develops a noble/commoner class structure and builds a new state with specialized institutions of regional control. Pristine state formation refers to those more unique events in which a new state arises in a context in which there are no extant other states. Pristine state-formation occurred in at least six unconnected or very lightly connected world regions: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River Valley, the Yellow River valley, Mesoamerica and the Andes. ⁵ Pristine state formation is much more difficult because, though all these instances occurred in regions where there were already complex chiefdoms, there were no existing states that could serve as exemplars of how to meet the organizational and resource challenges posed by the emergence of a large settlement (a city). The building of the global state is a similar challenge in which the institutions that have worked on smaller scales will be useful, but may not be up to dealing with new complications that emerge as part of the scaling-up process.

Evolution of interpolity institutional orders

The comparative world-systems perspective can be used for understanding the evolution of interpolity interactions and interpolity institutional orders. The big differences between interpolity systems are the size and complexity of the polities that are interacting. Bands were very small; empires were very big and complex. Polities also became more internally differentiated and developed greater internal hierarchy as they became larger. Technologies and organizational instruments, what Michael Mann (1986) has called ‘techniques of power’, were developed to enable powerful centres to extract resources from people who were a long away from the centre. Thus did core/periphery hierarchies become an important component of the processes of socio-cultural evolution.

Every interpolity system, whether it is composed of bands, tribes, chiefdoms or states, exhibits patterned interactions among neighbouring polities. This may be only based on the alliances and enmities that constitute a system of competing and conflicting polities, or it may also involve additional practices such as trade, tribute payments and shared cultural understandings. As Georg Simmel (1955) and many others have noted, conflict is a form of structured sociation that produces order and repeated patterns both within and between polities. Interpolity systems differ in terms of the extent to which interaction is based on conflict or cooperation, but there are few systems that are purely one or the other.

It might be assumed that early small-scale interpolity systems were based solely on conflict and that institutions facilitated the cooperation that evolved later to produce mixed systems. But very small interpolity systems are known of that already involved both cooperation and conflict (for example, Chase-Dunn and Mann, 1998) and so the assumption of an uncomplicated trend that begins with pure conflict does not hold. Indeed, conflict itself encourages cross-polity alliances as weaker polities seek to protect themselves from stronger ones. ⁶

The main evolutionary history of interpolity systems, besides the story of the emergence of larger and more complex polities, is about the development of institutions that structure interpolity and transpolity interactions in ways that facilitate greater cooperation (Bull, 2002; Buzan and Little, 2000). Institutions such as trade, money, intercultural trade languages, trade diasporas (Curtin, 1984), diplomacy, shared civilizational religions and transformations in the logics of accumulation (kin-based, tributary, capitalist) allow greater interpolity cooperation and facilitate the growth of polities and the expansion and intensification of interpolity networks. Norman Yoffee (2005) and others emphasize the importance of shared civilizational meanings for the emergence of early states. ⁷ The notion of ‘interpolity governance’ can be defined as the common recognition among a set of separate polities of the same authorities such as agreed-upon sacred places, oracles and religious authorities. These general (or specialized) functional authorities can facilitate interpolity communication, alliances, decision-making and regulation.

Interpolity governance may exist, but be very weak. It becomes stronger when interpolity organizations dedicated to general regulatory functions emerge, but these may have very low capacity to actually reduce conflict or to promote cooperation among competing polities. Interpolity cooperation is much easier if the autonomous polities share a civilizational orientation. At the edges of transpolity cultures, where different civilizations come into contact with one another, there is generally greater conflict.

And interpolity conflict (warfare) itself evolves (Levy and Thompson, 2011). Polities differ greatly in the degree to which they are oriented toward warfare. There are no known interpolity systems in which warfare is completely absent. But the importance of warfare in small-scale systems varies greatly. In some polities, the coming of age for nearly all males is mainly a process of becoming a warrior, while in others the warrior role is only a minor concern. Most interpolity systems exhibit cycles in which the frequency and intensity of warfare increases and decreases (e.g. Kirch, 1991). Increased importance and frequency of warfare is associated with greater gender hierarchy within polities (Collins et al., 1993). Class formation is also associated with greater gender hierarchy and with important changes in the structure of warfare.

Eventually specialized bodies of armed men become the key players in interpolity conflict. Polities differ in the extent to which they combine or separate the roles of religious leaders and war leaders. Differences in internal solidarity are important in interpolity success or failure in competition by means of warfare, and so more stratified and differentiated polities are sometimes conquered by less stratified and more solidary polities in which soldiers identify more closely with their leaders.

With the rise of states and the tributary modes of accumulation, warfare and conquest eventually became the mainstays of the logic accumulation. Legitimate coercion organized by states was central to the political economy of states and empires, though some small specialized trading states also emerged in the interstices between the tributary states and empires. Conquest was the main engine of the expansion of state power and was also very important for the founding of new imperial capitals. Polities whose marriage rules prescribed elite monogamy rather than polygyny had greater interclass solidarity than those that permitted elite polygyny, and elite monogamy also decreased the rate of the expansion of the elite.

The needs of empires to incorporate and rule conquered populations also selected in favour of world religions in which the ruling normative order could be extended to ethnically different groups based on the institutions of individual confession and conversion (Harris, 1991). World religions allowed conquered populations to be incorporated into the moral order of the conquerors, which reduced the level of resistance to conquest compared to the former situation in which conquered populations were permanently defined as inferior others. ⁸

The interstate system that emerged in Europe in the 17th century was a latecomer that was able to take advantage of the institutional heritages that were handed down from a long evolutionary past. This included the institutions of feudal Europe and the norms of diplomacy and respect for sovereignty that had developed among the city-states of the Italian peninsula. And it also included the heritage from the classical Western world, especially the Roman Empire, and also the economic institutions, productive and navigational technologies as well as the political, economic and religious institutions that had diffused from the Islamic world, Africa and East and South Asia.

Balance of power dynamics and the geopolitical logic of coalition-formation existed in all earlier interpolity systems, including those of inter-chiefdom systems as well as among early states and empires. Many scholars of the European interstate system suppose that the inscribed notion of ‘general war’ ⁹ and the institutionalized option of equal and symmetrical relations among polities were original innovations of the European international system (for instance, Modelski (1964)). The Westphalian system has been the most central institutional structure for the relations among core states in the modern (European) world-system. The system of colonial empires was the complex structure that linked nearly the entire rest of the world to the European cores states. The Westphalian system was extended to the whole globe as a result of the waves of decolonization of the European colonial empires that began in the 18th century (Abernethy, 2000). The most important pattern of interpolity governance in the modern world-system has been the hegemonic sequence. Partially legitimate world orders have been structured by the economic and political/military rise and fall of the three capitalist hegemons: the Dutch in the 17th century, the British in the 19th century and the U.S. in the 20th century. This evolutionary sequence has constituted interpolity governance by means of hegemony, interspersed by periods of hegemonic rivalry and world revolutions. ¹⁰

In the conceptualization of the evolution of interpolity governance offered in this article, there is a spiralling systemic interaction between the powerful elites led by the hegemons and the peasants and workers of the world, most of whom lived (and still live) in the Global South (the non-core) (Silver and Slater, 1999). World revolutions are rebellions and movements that cluster together in time, and become problems for the powers that be because they must be confronted simultaneously (Boswell and Chase-Dunn, 2000; Chase-Dunn and Niemeyer, 2009). The second leg of global governance in the modern system emerged after the Napoleonic Wars – international political organization. ¹¹ The Concert of Europe was an informal and halting effort to provide consultation among the Great Powers, but it was followed by the League of Nations, the United Nations and the international financial institutions that emerged after World War II. Thus the four most important institutional legs of the modern interpolity system have been:

The colonial empires have been replaced by the extension of the interstate system to the non-core and by the 19th-century incorporation of East Asia into the now-global interstate system.

David Wilkinson (1987, 1991, 2006) and other International Relations scholars have contended that the unusual extent to which the Westphalian system has institutionalized its commitment to general war is one important reason for the longevity of the modern interstate system and its ability to resist conversion into a core-wide empire. We agree that the institutional nature of the modern interstate system has been important, but another important feature of the modern interstate system has also played a large role in its resistance to the formation of a core-wide ‘universal’ empire. That is the unusually large role played by capitalism in the accumulation of wealth and power. The main power-balancers in this system (the United Provinces of The Netherlands and the United Kingdom of Great Britain) were also the most capitalist core states. As such they relied on commodity production, financial services and colonial empires rather than tribute extraction from adjacent conquests. Thus has the rising predominance of capitalism in the Europe-centred world-system played an important part in preventing the formation of a world empire. Certainly there were efforts to create a core-wide empire. Both Napoleonic France and 20th-century Germany made strong bids. But the capitalist hegemons were able to mobilize a coalition large enough to preserve the multi-centric structure of the modern core (Chase-Dunn, 1990, 1998: Ch 7–9).

The term ‘proto-state’ is meant to refer to a constellation of general and specialized institutions that have communicative and some regulatory functions but have only weak ability to enforce decisions. Clearly most contemporary national states have greater internal power with regard to a monopoly of legitimate violence than does the existing global proto-state. In federal states, such as the U.S. or Mexico, the provinces are not allowed to make war on one another, whereas national states can legitimately make war with other states and yet remain within the United Nations. The United Nations is a club of national states that does not itself have sovereign power to enforce international law (see Karns and Mingst, 2010). The veto power of members of the Security Council, in which a single national state can prevent the UN from intervening, is a severe limitation on the capacity of this global proto-state. ¹² In this article, the contemporary global proto-state is conceived as a constellation of institutions composed of the United Nations and its agencies, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, the Group of Eight and the Group of 20, as well as international regional security organizations, like NATO.

Thinking global state formation

Understandings of global state formation are confused by the fact that nearly all human polities in the past have existed in close proximal relations with other independent polities. Even so-called ‘universal empires’ interacted with other polities at their borders. This condition, which can be agreed upon as fundamental to understanding the processes of social change, has also produced a situation in which ‘the state’ is often partly defined with regard to its interaction with other states. This fact makes it difficult for some theorists to think about a single global state, because there would be no ‘foreign relations’. In this article, the authors strongly agree that many of the processes of polity formation in the past have been importantly caused by interactions among polities, obviously including warfare. Charles Tilly’s (1975) dictum about the history of European state formation, ‘the state makes war and war makes the state’, has been true. Yet, we disagree that this insight means that world state formation is impossible by definition. It should be noted that so-called ‘internal’ processes, including population pressure, technological innovations, conflicts within and between classes and fiscal crises have been important causes of the formation of states in the past and could be the kinds of processes that push toward global state formation in the future. Those who favour global state formation have often argued that warfare among states itself may be the best reason to construct a global polity that can resolve conflicts peaceably. ¹³ But a global state has to be thinkable before we can cogitate about how one might emerge and how that process might be accelerated.

Another factor that has made it hard to think about global state formation is the institutionalization of the Westphalian international system. International Relations theorists who focus mainly on the West have come to think of an interstate system with a number of competing ‘great powers’ as the norm. This did indeed become the norm with the rise of capitalism in Europe. But earlier interstate systems were periodically transformed by conquest into core-wide empires in which a single ‘universal state’ became the 800-pound gorilla of the system. Indeed, the East Asian network of fighting and allying states remained such a system until it was incorporated into the Europe-dominated state system in the 19th century. In the modern Europe-centred system, this pattern of core-wide empires was transformed into the rise and fall of hegemonic core states. The hegemons predominated, but they did not conquer the other core states. As capitalism rose to become the predominant mode of accumulation in the Europe-centred world-system, the main pattern of interpolity domination shifted from tributary empires constructed by conquering adjacent core states to colonial empires in which a set of competing core states subjugated distant colonies in the non-core. The strategy of core-wide empire did not disappear, but those efforts that were made along this line by Napoleonic France and Germany in the 20th century were defeated by capitalist hegemons and their allies. Thus did the system of states and the reproduction of a core composed several autonomous states, rather than a single ‘universal’ state, come to be the new normal. This is another factor that makes it difficult to think about global state formation.

But globalization, and consciousness of it, have come along to challenge the verities of the institutionalized interstate system. The acceptance of the idea of a single global economy makes a single global political system easier to think of. And much of the discourse about globalization has focused on the claim that national states have lost autonomy vis-à-vis transnational corporations and the global market place. The world-systems perspective on globalization is that there have been waves of large-scale integration all along and that the wave since World War II needs to be understood by comparing it for similarities and differences with earlier waves, especially the one that occurred in the 19th century (Chase-Dunn et al., 2000).

Some scholars contend that global state formation is impossible because state formation and socio-cultural evolution in general are caused mainly by competition among states – both warfare and economic competition, and so a single state standing by itself is impossible or would be very short-lived because of the absence of external threats (for example, Turchin and Gavrilets, 2009). Social cooperation and integration within polities are alleged to occur mainly because polities that do not manage to attain internal solidarity will be conquered or economically subordinated by other polities that are more internally solidary. And within the successful solidary polities social integration eventually breaks down because of the free-rider problem and so external threats are necessary to revive it. There is alleged to be a strong and constant within-polity selection favouring free-riders, and eventually all polities succumb to it. The bases of this tendency toward selfishness and conflict are thought to be both cultural and genetic in the human species. So, social norms promoting cooperation and suppressing selfishness tend to be replaced by norms that are permissive or even promote selfishness (‘greed is good’). At some point, the polity becomes unable to maintain itself and is replaced (e.g. conquered or driven down the economic food-chain) by other polities with stronger social norms that promote internal cooperation.

A major assumption in this approach is that the selection pressures in favour of cooperation and organization are primarily external, resulting from interpolity competition. We agree, as noted above, that interpolity competition has been an important factor in socio-cultural evolution. But recognition of this need not ignore the existence of strong internal factors that propel differentiation and hierarchy formation as well as solidarity and cooperation. Also institutions of interpolity cooperation have emerged that have altered the dynamics of interpolity competition (such as, world religions, market trade, international organization) and new ones could emerge in the future (for example, global democracy). The model outlined above assumes a view of human nature that has been especially promoted recently by evolutionary psychologists and neo-social Darwinians, but this view is strongly contested by other students of human nature and socio-cultural evolution. This approach excludes the possibility of world government because of its emphasis on the necessity of external competition. This is a substantive argument that must be kept in mind when considering how proto-global state formation has already occurred, and how a stronger, more capable and more democratic world government might emerge in the future. To the extent that humans are individualistic, either because of biology or because of cultural evolution (or both), it will be necessary to design institutional structures that are complementary with a healthy degree of individual freedom, respect and tolerance.

Thus, global state formation may be deemed impossible by definition or by contentions about human nature or theories of what produces cooperation and solidarity. But even those who consider global state formation to be at least a theoretical possibility usually see it as something that is not likely to happen for a long time. Some observers of human socio-cultural evolution predict the emergence of a single Earth-wide state based on the long-term trend in which polities get larger and less numerous. Projecting from historical trends, Raoul Naroll (1967) forecast a 0.40 probability of a world state emerging by 2125 and a 0.95 probability by 2750. Naroll’s student, Louis Marano (1973), predicted a world empire around 3500 C.E. Robert Carneiro (2004) projected the decline in autonomous political units from 600,000 in 1500 BCE to a single global government in 2300 CE Those factors are now considered that might speed up global state formation, allowing it to happen within the next few decades.

The modern multistate system has experienced waves of international political integration that began after the Napoleonic Wars early in the 19th century. Britain and the Austro-Hungarian Empire organized a ‘Concert of Europe’ (Jervis, 1985) that was intended to prevent future French revolutions and Napoleonic adventures. During the middle of the 19th century, a large number of specialized international organizations emerged such as the International Postal Union (Murphy, 1994) that underwrote the beginnings of a global civil society that included more than elites, and this network of transnational voluntary associations grew much larger during the most recent wave of economic globalization since World War II (Boli and Thomas, 1999). After World War I the League of Nations was intended to provide collective security, though it was seriously weakened because the United States did not join. After World War II the United Nations became a proto-world-state, the efficacy of which has waxed and waned since then. The system of national states is being slowly overlain by global and regional transnational political organizations that have repeatedly blossomed after periods of war and during periods of economic globalization.

Robert Bates Graber has proposed a model of political globalization based primarily on the force of population pressure (Graber, 2004). Marketization, decolonization, new lead technologies, the rise and fall of hegemons and the growth of international political organizations can be added to the population pressure model in order to forecast future trajectories of global state formation. We also take into account the structural differences between recent and earlier periods. For example, the period of British hegemonic decline moved rather quickly toward conflictive hegemonic rivalry because economic competitors such as Germany were able to develop powerful military capabilities. The decline of U.S. hegemony has been different in that the United States ended up as the single superpower after the demise of the Soviet Union. Some economic challengers (Japan and Germany) cannot easily play the military card because they are stuck with the consequences of having lost the last World War. And other potential challengers are dissuaded by the sheer size of the existing U.S, military advantage. This, and the immense size of the U.S. economy, will probably slow the process of hegemonic decline down relative to the speed of the British decline. Modelling the global future should also consider changes that have occurred in labour relations, urban–rural relations, the nature of emergent city regions, and the shrinking of the global reserve army of labour (Silver, 2003).

In the modern world-system, the series of successful hegemons has been facilitated by generative economic sectors and new lead technologies that have funded successful performance in world wars and profitable accumulation by means of production for the world market (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005; Modelski and Thompson, 1996). New lead technologies generate both profits and revenues. Revenues are important for the fiscal health of national states. Staying ahead of the product cycle by developing new high technology products is a key to the rise of challengers and to the maintenance of hegemony once it is attained (Gilpin, 2000).

Hegemony also has an ideological dimension, as argued by Antonio Gramsci (1971; see also Gill, 2003). It is part coercion and part consent. The consent part is greatly facilitated by economic success and the ability to reward loyal allies. But the ideological basis is also important because it develops the elements of consensually based authority upon which global governance institutions are based. Britain suppressed the slave trade, thus taking high ground in the global moral order and promoting the idea that human rights were inconsistent with slavery and serfdom. The U.S. claimed to be the leader of global democracy and ‘the first new nation’ championing the notions of national self-determination and the illegitimacy of formal colonialism. The U.S. provided support for the decolonization of the colonial empires of other core powers, albeit while negotiating the placement of a global network of its military bases at the same time (Go, 2011). Hegemony, and global leadership generally, requires universalistic ideals. These ideals have been formed in a series of world revolutions since the Protestant Reformation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the result of movements from below asserting their rights. These rights are not yet universally enforced, even by the core states. But they are the precipitate of a long-term historical contest over global governance in which social movements have become increasingly transnational. This is an important element that needs to be considered in our consideration of how global state formation might be accelerated.

Accelerating global state formation

Several urgent human-created problems are looming in the 21st century (Chase-Dunn and Lawrence, 2011). The human population continues to grow rapidly, though the rate of growth is slowing as the decline in the fertility rate diffuses to the Global South. Population pressure on resources and industrial production are degrading the natural capital of the global ecosystem. U.S. hegemonic decline and the rise of challengers is destabilizing the existing system of global governance and producing a crisis of global leadership. Transnational social movements protesting continuing huge North/South inequalities and growing inequalities within some countries are growing more powerful. Globalized transportation and industrial agriculture may have speeded up the generation and diffusion of pathogenic micro-organisms. Many contend that democratized, legitimate and capacious institutions of global governance will be needed to prevent these developments from leading to higher levels of conflict in the coming decades.

How might global state formation and the democratization of global governance be accelerated within the next several decades? Several factors are now considered that are likely to have implications for the effort to accelerate the emergence of more legitimate and effective institutions of global governance.

As discussed above, the comparative evolutionary world-systems perspective tells us that changes in the scale of human interaction networks have often been produced by semi-peripheral development in the past. Semi-peripheral marcher states produced most of the empire upsweeps. The capitalist mode of accumulation has been expanded and deepened by semi-peripheral capitalist city-states, the semi-peripheral world region that was Europe, and formerly semi-peripheral national states that became the successive hegemons.

Technological development is universally agreed to be one of the critical conditions for accelerating institutional change. David Harvey (1989) and others have noted the phenomenon of ‘time-space compression’ that has accompanied the transition to flexible accumulation and globalized capitalism. Technological change has certainly speeded up and social change in general may have speeded up as well. And the world revolutions seem to have begun to overlap one another. ¹⁴ This may mean that the evolution of global governance might also accelerate.

Technological change is definitely important for producing the conditions that would be needed for global state formation. It can be noted that the importance of new lead industries in the process of hegemonic also rises and falls. New lead industries might also facilitate global state formation. The ability to use less expensive fuels in generative sectors was important for both the British (coal) and the U.S. rise (oil) (Podobnik, 2006). Anticipation of ‘peak oil’ has already caused resource wars and has accelerated U.S. hegemonic decline by encouraging the Bush administration neo-conservatives to steer a unilateral foreign policy (Stokes and Raphael, 2010). If some new technological fix could produce another source of cheap energy this would help provide the resources needed for more rapid global state formation. The fossil fuel party will eventually be over, but how much this causes energy prices to rise and how quickly will depend on the cost of the new sources of energy. If energy costs rise quickly this is likely to slow down the emergence of a global government and exacerbate resource wars, but if energy costs rise slowly, or if a new cheap source of energy is found, this would probably speed the rise of global democracy. The likelihood of rising energy costs makes it prudent to think about low-energy strategies of global state formation.

All the previous advances in global governance have taken place after a hegemon has declined and there has been a world war among rivals. H. G. Wells saw the importance of catastrophes in the emergence of a new civilization (Wagar, 1961). The idea here is that major organizational changes tend to emerge after huge catastrophes when the existing institutions are in disarray and need to be rebuilt and when people are sufficiently disgusted with the old failed institutions that have led to disaster. ¹⁵ Of course, political actors who seek to promote the emergence of an effective and democratic global state must also do all that they can to try to prevent another war among the great powers because humanistic morality must trump whatever advantages might result from such a catastrophe. This said, many believe that it is rather likely that major calamities will occur in the coming decades regardless of the efforts of far-sighted world citizens and social movements. And it would make both tactical and strategic sense to have plans for how to move forward if indeed a perfect storm of calamities were to come about.

But attempts should also be made to try to imagine how an effective and democratic global government might emerge in the absence of huge calamities. Let us suppose that a series of moderate-sized ecological, economic and political calamities that are somewhat spaced out in time can suffice to provide sufficient disruption of the existing world order and motivation for its reconstruction along more cooperative, effective and democratic lines. The scenario we have in mind involves a network of alliances among progressive social movements and the political regimes of countries in the Global South along with some allies in the Global North. We are especially sanguine about the possibility of relatively powerful semi-peripheral states coming to be controlled by democratic socialist or populist regimes that can provide resources to progressive global parties and movements. The long-term pattern of semi-peripheral development that has operated in the socio-cultural evolution of world-systems suggests that the ‘advantages of backwardness’ may again play an important role in the coming world revolution and global governance transition.

One scenario would involve a coalescent party network of the New Global Left that would emerge from the existing ‘movement of movements’ that have been participating in the World Social Forum and the recent anti-austerity and democracy movements. Recent decades have seen the further expansion of transnational social movements (Moghadam, 2005; Smith, 2008). The World Social Forums (WSF), established as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, have been remarkable efforts to build the foundation for a just and democratic world (Smith et al., 2007; Chase-Dunn and Reese 2007). The WSF events are open spaces of dialogue, where members of the ‘movement of movements’ meet to organize opposition to neo-liberal globalization and to begin the building of a more humane and sustainable world society. Multiple experiments in ‘solidarity economy’ have sought to prefigure a more human and sustainable world beyond the kinds of corporate capitalism that have brought humanity to the current crisis.

Ann Florini (2004) acknowledges the need for democratic global governance processes to address global issues that simply cannot be dealt with by separate national states. Florini contends that global state formation is impossible, undesirable and would engender huge opposition from all quarters. Instead, she sees a huge potential for democratizing global governance through uses of the Internet for mobilizing global civil society. Florini agrees many others point out that existing institutions of global governance have a huge democratic deficit. The use of cheap and relatively free Internet communications by social movements has come to everyone’s attention since the Arab Spring of 2011. Globalization from below by transnational social movements could play an important role in speeding both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of global governance institutions (see Coleman and Tucker, 2012).

The neo-conservatism of the Bush administration heaped fuel on the calls for a multipolar world and challenges to the leadership of the United States. The Obama administration has been far more friendly to the idea of a multipolar system of global governance, preferring multilateralism and support for regional and global institutions over the unilateral adventures of the previous administration. Semi-peripheral Russia, trying to regain global status after the demise of the Soviet Union, has called for a more multipolar world order. The Russian government hosted a conference in 2009 to foster an alliance among some of the semi-peripheral countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. The so-called ‘Pink Tide’ of populist regimes in Latin America also represents a renewed challenge to the predominance of global capitalism, proclaiming a 21st-century version of socialism (Robinson, 2008) and new respect for indigenous people and their cultures.

Survey research shows that World Social Forum activists from the Global South are somewhat less likely than those from the Global North to support the idea of a democratic world government (Chase-Dunn et al., 2008). This is probably because global institutions in the past reflect the history of the colonial empires and because the existing institutions suffer from what is widely understood to be a democratic deficit. The decision-making structures of the United Nations do not represent the peoples of the world (Coleman and Tucker, 2012). There is no World Parliament in which populations are represented. George Monbiot (2003) and others have proposed the establishment of a Global Peoples’ Parliament to represent the people of the world in global governance. Such a parliament should be based on delegation and representation of the peoples of the Earth and should operate on the principal of majority decision-making. Demographically large countries would have great influence in such an institution. But purely demographic weight could be counter-balanced by the U.N. General Assembly in which each member state has one vote. The General Assembly is democratic in form, representing national states by the formula of ‘one nation, one vote’. But the existing General Assembly has little authority over most of the important decisions that are made by the United Nations.

The most important powers are held by the Security Council. The permanent members of the Security Council are the powers that won World War II. The Security Council can veto proposals to reform the structure of the U.N., which it has done repeatedly since the formation of the U.N. in 1945. In order to be a legitimate global authority, the United Nations would have to become more democratic by adding a parliament, broadening control of the Security Council and increasing the powers of the General Assembly and a new Peoples’ Parliament. Such a global authority would be widely viewed as representing the interests of the people of world and would be more strongly supported by those from the Global South.

But there is another grave deficit at the U.N. It does not have the capacity to effectively help humanity meet the challenges of the 21st century. The main weakness is with regard to the U.N.’s ability to resolve major conflicts and to enforce decisions that are made. In order to be able to resolve major conflicts among powerful national states, the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces would have to be superior to those military forces that might choose to oppose it. It is usual to consider global governance without discussing Max Weber’s definition of a state as most importantly ‘a monopoly of legitimate violence’. Yet ignoring the issue of military power and security will not help us through the coming period of great power rivalry. The United Nations is not a state by Weber’s definition.

Rather, a near monopoly of global violent capability is held by the armed forces of the United States. This is the de facto world state, but without legitimacy according to broadly accepted definitions of democratic control. The President of the United States is the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces. But s/he is not elected by the peoples of the world. So U.S. military power is not legitimate, especially when it is exercised unilaterally, as it was during the Bush administration. The Obama administration’s approach has been better in some cases, as demonstrated in the successful multilateral support for opposition forces in Libya. But this stealthy soft power approach is not likely to be successful in providing a structure for resolving potential conflicts that are likely to emerge among the great powers during a long period of slowly declining U.S. hegemony. And the new approach has not been consistent. The eradication of Osama bin Laden was another instance of unilateral use of military force.

A legitimate global government would provide due process even to those who are widely considered to be terrorists. In order to have sufficient capability to resolve conflicts among the great powers, the U.N. would also need the legal ability to collect taxes, such as the proposed Tobin Tax on international financial transactions. With such capability, and with additional legitimacy produced by meaningful democratization, the U.N. would be in a much better position to effectively mediate the conflicts that are likely to emerge in the coming multipolar structure of interstate power.

There is an existing global military apparatus that has been erected by the United States, composed of 865 facilities in 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories (Johnson, 2010: 183). Chalmers Johnson, an intrepid critic of imperial U.S. foreign policy, decries the effects that hegemony, and especially the shift toward unilateral militarism, has had on the quality of democracy within the United States. In order to prevent the permanent transition from a republic to an empire, Johnson proposes that the U.S. global military apparatus should be sold back to the countries in which the bases and other facilities are located. This would also provide revenues that could be used to revitalize the physical infrastructure of the U.S. The authors of this article agree with the contention that hegemony has not been good for democracy in the U.S. The rapid expansion of income inequality since the 1970s, for instance, has produced a polity that is increasingly reminiscent of Imperial Rome. Neoliberal economic policies have combined with neoconservative use of military power to undermine the middle class and the political process. And so we concur with Johnson, and, furthermore, it is suggested that the neo-liberal globalization project should be added to the list of causes.

We also agree with Johnson that dismantling the empire would be a good thing for both the world and for the U.S. But it is doubtful that the culture and the dependencies that have been created can be rapidly changed. And so a slightly different version of Johnson’s radical proposal is offered that can help with the issue of the instability of a multipolar world, while also helping the United States move in a more healthy direction.

Johnson (2010) proposes that all 865 U.S. military facilities be sold to the countries in which they are located. We propose that one-third of these be kept under the control of the U.S. federal government in order to provide some continuity both domestically and in the larger world that has come to expect the U.S. to play the role of providing stability. Another third should be sold to the countries in which they are located. These facilities should be ones that are located in countries where the U.S. military involvement has generated a high level of popular resentment. And the other third should be sold to the United Nations. Command over these should be transferred to a global multilateral agency similar in form to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but under the control of the democratized United Nations. The U.S. would continue to play an important supporting role in this globalized and democratized structure of military power, which could provide useful continuity for a substantial part of the large military labour force and industrial complex that is the domestic legacy of U.S. hegemony.

A United Nations with a substantial share of global military power would have an enhanced reputation that would spill over to its other activities. The U.N. would also need to exercise more control over the global financial institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization – and they would also benefit from the increased legitimacy to be derived from democratic oversight. Some of the institutional elements of a global democratic state already exist, but they need to be democratized and made more capable as quickly as possible. The task in hand is how to avoid the worst excesses of the kind of interregnum that occurred during the first half of the 20th century.

This article has outlined the evolution of interpolity institutional orders, described the challenges in thinking about global state formation and discussed some of the technological and political forces that might accelerate the long-term trend toward global state formation.