Today’s challenges transcend borders. Can history show us how to cooperate?
Global problems require global responses. And we have plenty of global problems. Is a single, unified authority – a world government – required to solve them? Is that even feasible? It rather depends, doesn’t it, on what we mean by the phrase. An emperor with a single empire? Some form of democratic federal government of the world? Star Wars features a galactic republic, but then that’s science fiction.
It is hard to imagine a global government with global citizens in a world with such strong local identities and such different political and social systems. As we have realised since the end of the cold war, the nation state is not only alive, it is kicking. The EU struggles with its members; think of that on a world scale. One person, one vote won’t work either when in certain countries a single leader would cast the votes for millions.
