Barack Obama Will Save the World!

One of the ideas currently floating around is the notion that current international problems necessitate institutions of global scope to solve them, that is, we need world government to fix the world's problems.

Gideon Rachman, for example, makes the case for supranational governance in his piece, "And Now For a World Government."

Arguments for world government are almost always based in utopianism: If there were a single human purpose with a single center of power, the multitudes of the planet might unite as one to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and end warfare. At various times in international relations global reformers have been motivated by the need to transcend narrow national interests for the good of humankind. Perhaps most recently, the establishment of the United Nations reenergized idealists that the aftermath of the world's most devastating conflict would create the consensus among world leaders to unite in a single body of international scope with enough power and resources to govern the globe (the Wikipedia entry on this notes that current enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court and similar supranational authorities is based in the ideology of world governmental power over nation-states).

In his piece, Rachman waxes longingly for a world body and makes reference to Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, where the President-Elect has written, "When the world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following."

But check out Harold Meyerson, at the American Prospect, who places all of his hopes of world socialist utopianism in the hands of "The One":

At the end of the Civil War, Americans lived within local economies. Then railroads, steel and oil companies, meatpackers, and eventually automakers, with the considerable assistance of the nation's largest banks, began functioning on a national level, bending state and local governments to their will. Largely unregulated and in the absence of national countervailing powers, these institutions were unassailable until the crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression stripped them of much of their clout. Only then did Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal create national regulations on their conduct, and the agencies to enforce them. Only then did genuinely national unions arise that won national contracts from employers.

Taking government from the state to the national level was necessary to save the economy and build American prosperity. During the waning days of the Hoover administration, for instance, the governors of a number of states ordered bank closings to forestall depositors' runs on the banks. What the governors could not do, however, was restore depositor confidence. That is precisely what Roosevelt did, by coupling an order to close all banks so their books could be checked with the establishment of a federal deposit insurance agency -- a solution beyond capabilities and resources of the nation's insolvent state houses. Similarly, though individual states had enacted wage and hour laws before the Depression, creating the prosperity and stability of the post?World War II economy required the New Deal federal standards.

Today, Obama faces a similar challenge to Roosevelt's - and has a similar opportunity. Over the past several decades, the same asymmetry of power that characterized America between 1865 and 1932 reappeared - but on a larger scale. Finance and corporations have become global, outstripping the regulatory and bargaining powers of merely national governments and unions. Now, as in 1933, it is suddenly possible to globalize at least some standards and regulations, just as Roosevelt once nationalized them. The changes will come more haltingly and piecemeal than they did in Roosevelt's New Deal, because the leap from nation-state to global order is far greater than that from state capitols to Pennsylvania Avenue. But as in Roosevelt's time, the changes will come because the asymmetry of power led to an unregulated economy that collapsed of its own weight and folly - and because the only way out of the collapse may be to regulate that power on the global scale where, until recently, it was unchallenged.

How broad the changes are, how sturdy or rickety the new global architecture that emerges is, depends on a multitude of variables. Financial institutions may well oppose the formation of transnational agencies that, say, restrict the amount of leverage they're allowed to carry; multinational corporations will surely resist anything resembling global labor laws. Nations that disproportionately rely on the financial sector will oppose financial restrictions; nations at different stages of economic development will take different positions on wage and environmental standards. The very idea of a global New Deal would be altogether preposterous but for the fact that the return of prosperity may depend upon it. But then, the same once could have been said of a national New Deal, too. Finally, just as the creation of the national New Deal depended upon Roosevelt, the creation of a global one will depend upon Obama -- a figure who seems uniquely suited to voice not just the nation's but the planet's aspirations. The world - its citizens and its economy - awaits him.

Note the assumption here that many, if not most, of the "financial institutions" and "multinational corporations" will be American. And that's what talk of world government is all about: the establishment of a world regime to regulate American power and the agents of American influence, in this case U.S. transnational enterprises that are, for all intents and purposes, in the left's paradigm, the masters of the universe.

Nevermind that, in fact, some for largest corporations in the world are headquartered in places like Tokyo or Stuttgart. America remains the world's hegemon, and if U.S. and global activists have their way, they'll tie down U.S. global supremacy like a modern-day Gulliver.