Contradictions of World Govt

In The Ways of Judgment: The Bampton Lectures, 2003 , Oliver O’Donovan suggests that the notion of world government is conceptually contradictory: “World government is an abstract idea: the government of a people with no internal relations of mutual recognition. A people with no relations has no identity, and the government of those with no identity has no legitimacy. Whatever their claims to universality, in practice all empires need strong boundaries, which define their identity by excluding peoples who live beyond them. The practical difficulty is a direct implication of this. The more imperial rule encourages the confidence and freedom of its subjects, the more it finds its unitary governing structures under strain. To be a single political society is to act together in certain ways, to have a unitary sense of identity in certain common undertakings. When initiatives and endeavors lead in different directions, it becomes more difficult to hold them with a single decision-making structure. The more cultural pursuits flourish in an empire, then, the more oppressive the regulatory authority comes to feel . . . This points to the inevitable reality of all empire: it must recreate an ‘I-Thou’ structure it has attempted to suppress.”

This seems to imply that international relations that “can have no form except a religious and moral one; there can be no international politics.” But he thinks that this is too hasty a conclusion. He points to the medieval model of Christian international politics: “one that lay within the ‘spiritual’ realm, vested in the papacy,” government by “the order of nature,” which was “revealed in a new clarity by the Gospel.” In this conception, the papacy “was conceived as constituting a kind of international tribunal that could pronounce authoritatively on matters of right between sovereigns where no domestic right prevailed.” This included a (contested) right to depose rulers. O’Donovan makes the striking comment that modern internationalism is modeled on the papal precedent: “What was needed was not world government, but a seat of judgment that could declare international right with sufficient authority to strengthen the aspirations for peace among independent political communities.”