Review article: World government: Renewed debate, persistent challenges

Abstract

World government has, very recently, resumed its place as the subject of serious investigation by leading scholars in International Relations, economics and political theory. Prompted variously by global economic integration, the persistence of the nuclear weapons threat and a US hegemony that ostensibly functions as a form of world state, some empirically oriented scholars have found themselves pursuing discrete lines of inquiry to the common possibility of global political integration. The main empirical currents, especially those focused on security, have important precedents in the world state ‘heyday’ of 1944—50, and some are open to the kinds of critiques previously levied at such arguments. Normative arguments advocating gradual expansions of core rights through political integration may offer the most plausible and defensible route to deep global integration, but not necessarily one that will end at some comprehensive world state modelled on the nation-state.