My dad and I have this discussion periodically, about world government. We both think it's necessary, even inevitable, but we have really different ideas about how it should/will come about and what we would do to support it.
Dad thinks it'll come about via a military coup of some sort, that there will be a dictatorship under a man whose personal charisma is so great that he can sway the millions needed to stage such a coup.
I think it needs to come about organically, growing out of the governmental systems we already have; that the UN's ultimate role is as a world-wide legislative system. I think that a military coup leads inexorably to disaster; maybe I've read too much science fiction.
Dad thinks a world government is important enough, necessary enough, that he thinks he'd fight for a dictatorial system who had a charismatic enough leader. You need vision to rule the world, after all.
I think that an individual might be charismatic and visionary enough, and maybe even _right_ enough -- a benevolent dictator, if you will -- to fight for, but what happens when he dies? World government can't be based on one man's strength. If _he_ is the one holding all the pieces together -- I do not think an individual could actually run the world by himself, Victor von Doom notwithstanding -- then when he dies, those pieces fall apart. The odds of him being replaced by an equally charismatic, visionary, _right_ individual are much too slim for my tastes.
One of several things happens from there, to my perspective. One: the government simply falls apart, returning to individual countries and factions, its glue too fragile to hold without the applicator. That's the least dismaying possibility, and it leaves us without what I think we need, a world government.
Two: the government im-or-ex-plodes, factions within backbiting as a power struggle ensues. That leads to war, and now we have a global-scale civil war on our hands. A global government might survive that, but not without a leader emerging to pull it through.
Three: a successor takes BD (Benevolent Dictator)'s place. He either does or does not have the ability to hold the thing together; if he does not, one of the first two scenarios come to pass. If he does, there is no guarantee that he's another BD; dictators don't often seem to pick and groom their successors, but rather assume they're going to live forever. (See Castro, Fidel.) _If_ he is another BD, great, things are grand. If not, the world's under the leadership of a military dictator, and that doesn't appeal to me at all.
Dad's willing, he says, to give up some of his personal rights. That's how important world government is to him.
See, I'm not willing to do that. I don't believe that a government built initially without certain rights -- freedom of speech, religion (see Bill of Rights, the) -- will then adapt to _provide_ those rights at a later date. I think once they're gone, they're gone, and you're screwed. I'm more of the, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it," school. I think a world government is vital to the continuing survival of this planet, but the cost of personal freedoms is too high.
The _only_ way I can see a government developing that wouldn't sacrifice those freedoms would be -- one, through a revolution much like the American Revolution. Most of the world would need to participate or be benignly indifferent, and that strikes me as terribly unlikely.
The other way that I see, which seems more possible to me, would be a government growing up out of what we already have. The UN is the obvious place to start; unfortunately at the moment its hands are tied because of the Big Five, who have way, way too much power. (And, out of those five, the US is by far the worst transgressor; it's not that we give too much money to the UN, it's that we are much, much too quick to flaunt that fact and use it to our advantage at the cost of others.) Until the Five are willing to release some of the power they were granted at the beginning, the UN is going to remain crippled. Never-the-less, it's the best starting point we have.
Building a world government out of the UN wouldn't be easy. Again, a great deal of that is due to the United States, though it's more our freedoms than our money that are the problem in developing a governmental system. On a global Bill of Rights, freedom of speech and religion would probably be relatively easy to put across. It's the American right to bear arms that would cause enormous difficulties.
Americans hold that right holy. Hell, even _I_ consider it vitally important to our society, symbolically if nothing else. No one else in the world, as far as I know, holds the right to bear arms as a _Constitutionally supported right_, and most other peoples are continually appalled at the violence that right brings to our society. In developing a world government, that's a problem. America's unlikely to give up its beloved arms. The rest of the world is unlikely to give in to the gun-toting psychotic Americans. Unless a compromise can be found, a world government is probably doomed on that aspect alone. To succeed, I think such an entity would require the support of the US, though it's possible the rest of the world could form a government around the US. (That would be a hell of a position to be in. Isolationism at its finest.)
There's a lot that I think is leading us to a world government. The first-world global economy is entirely dependent on nations functioning together; one pulls out or goes into a slump, and everyone is damaged. That allows for power plays and for inadvertent injuries, neither of which is long-term advantageous for the economy as a whole.
A thousand years ago, the world's relative size was unfathomable. Five hundred years ago, it was compromisable, but at great cost and time. A hundred years ago, with the advent of motorized vehicles and air travel, what was once prohibitive became merely time consuming; today, the world's relative size is negligible, and growing smaller daily. Twenty-four hours of travel can bring me around the world, and the Internet makes world-wide communications instantaneous. The smaller the world becomes, the easier it is for us to affect one another; a governmental system with everyone's best interests in mind is a great deal more practical than squabbling over minor differences.
From a socialist standpoint -- and I am, at heart, a socialist; capitalism is a lousy way to run a society -- a world government has the ability to provide things that we have the _resources_ but not the manpower, interest, or funding to provide today. There _is_ enough food for everyone; it's just that it's incredibly badly distributed. Shelter, medicine, and other basic amenities could _be_ provided, if there was a system in place that allowed the resources we have to be pooled and placed where they're needed. Our problems are too large to concentrate on "fixing America first"; the world needs a hand, and in order to do that, we need a governmental system that's focused on all of us.
It's a worthwhile goal; the question is how to get there. Revolution is probably a long way off: man will put up with an awful lot before he decides to fight back. Likewise, a peaceful development is not going to happen tomorrow. We are still, as individual nations, too tied up in our own identities and secrets and power to relinquish any of that to a larger governing body.
I'd like to imagine it'll happen in my lifetime. I don't know that it _will_, and if it does, I don't know which side I'll be on. Dad thinks he'd fight for anybody that he thought had a real chance at uniting the nations, dictator or not. Me, I'm clinging to an ideology that might not last in the face of a truly charismatic leader, but hey, that's what ideology does.
I don't know what's going to happen. I do think a world government is inevitable, and I do think that in the next few years we're going to reach a breaking point, and things are going to begin to develop in that direction. It'll be interesting to see if I'm right.