World government, revisited

Gideon Rachman / Financial Times

There are plenty of people who argue that the financial crisis is a severe setback for globalisation. Come to think of it, I am one of those people. In a column I wrote just after the Davos meeting, I argued that you could see the process of globalisation going into reverse.

Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, has just published a fascinating riposte to this line of thinking. He argues that globalisation is only in difficulties “if you believe it is mainly about international trade and investment.” But, according to Naim, it is about much more than that – above all, globalisation is about a growing web of international networks, caused in large part by the communications revolution and the internet. Naim cites numerous examples – global charities, global criminal networks, social networking, international terrorism. None of this is going away.

If you can think beyond the international economic crisis – and admittedly, it’s difficult – Naim argues that the real issue is that “globalisation has multiplied the number of problems that no country or organisation or country can solve on its own.” Which brings us back to that old topic of global governance, or as I prefer to call it – “world government”. Naim reckons that the “the gap between the need for effective collective action at the global level and the ability of the international community to satisfy that need is the most dangerous deficit facing humanity.”

A big statement. But it’s certainly true that the international institutions we have seem singularly ill-adapted to the challenges they face. That indeed, is the theme of my column on the EU in tomorrow’s paper.