"fifteen years ago.. Wallerstein's advice to work towards the creation of a socialist world government sounded fanciful or worse. While the very notion of a world government seemed wholly unrealistic, the notion of a socialist world government had been completely discredited by the practices of the various Socialist Internationals, which had either failed in their purposes or had turned into instruments of domination of the weak by the powerful. ... Variants of developmentalism (socialist variants included) seemed to be delivering at least something of what they had promised.... Today, the notion seems less fanciful. The Group of Seven has been meeting regularly and has come to look more and more like a committee for managing the common affairs of the world bourgeoisie... The IMF and the World Bank have acted increasingly like a world ministry of finance. Last but not least, the 1990s have been inaugurated by the refurbishing of the UN Security council as aworld ministry of police. In totally unplanned fashion, a structure of world government is being put in place bit by bit.. by the great.. powers themselves.
To be sure, the whole process of world government formation has been sponsored and controlled by conservative forces preoccupied almost exclusively with the legitimation and enforcement of the extremely unequal global distribution of wealth... Most likely, the speed-up (in world government formation) has been nothing but a pragmatic response to the political and ideological void left in the interstate system by the collapse of developmentalism. How.. can a process that has developed to legitimate and enforce world inequalities be turned into a means to the end of promoting greater world equality and solidarity?
In an age of rampant greed and of collapse of the socialst projects of the past, the endeavor naturally looks hopeless. Yet take another fifteen year step forward--this time into the future. As mentioned, the structural problems... can be expected to have become more rather than less serious. but while the process of world-government formation will be far more advanced than it is now, the costs of systemic chaos for the peoples of the West will also be much higher. Protection costs in particular--broadly understood to include not just investments in means of violence and armed forces, but also bribes and other payments to clients and friendly forces in the disintegrating East and South, as well as costly or irreparable damages to the human psyche--will have escalated to the point where the pursuit of oligarchic wealth will begin to appear to many as what it has always been: a highly destructive endeavour that shifts the costs of the prosperity and security of a minority (no more, and prbably less, than one-sixth of the human race) onto the majority and onto the future generations of the minority itself... Western socialists will then face their own moment of truth. Either they will join forces with Eastern and southern associates and come up with an intellectual project and a political programme capable of transforming systemic chaos into a more equal and solidary world order, or their appeals to human progress and social justice will lose all residual credibility.
The only thing that needs to be updated about this analysis is the endeavour no longer looks so hopeless.
Steven Sherman