Description
The immediate aftermath of the first atomic bombings saw a groundswell of support for the idea of world government as the only means to avert impending catastrophe. With the slogan of “one world or none,” various luminaries rallied behind the proposal that cataclysmic war was the inevitable consequence of “non-integrated sovereignties in contact” (Reves, 1945). Although the initial momentum of the movement was soon dashed by the gathering Cold War, the underlying notion of a terminal crisis of sovereignty endured. Remarkably, even prominent political realists like Hans Morgenthau and John Herz eventually admitted the obsolescence of the nation-state when “utmost strength coincides in the same unit with utmost vulnerability” (Herz, 1957). Yet they simultaneously struggled to reconcile within their political philosophy the apparent necessity of world government with the practical steps required for its realisation. The bind of the security dilemma appeared to them logically unassailable, even as the rational pursuit of security by states seemed inexorably to lead to their mutual annihilation. For all schemes for world government ultimately confront the same irreducible contradiction: they require states to create through voluntary agreement the very authority that could compel them, presupposing the very solution they seek to construct. Indeed, the call for a world government entails not the abolition of sovereignty per se but rather its establishment in a higher, exclusive entity. However, its realisation in the absence of coercion is conditional on a level of trust and cooperation among consenting polities that only a world government could assure by resolving the security dilemma. Faced with this aporia, the political realists resigned themselves to an implausible hope for a radical global transformation in human consciousness, ultimately falling back on coexistence strategies and technocratic arms control that managed rather than resolved the fundamental contradiction of sovereignty in the nuclear age.
