We live in an age that is gesturing towards global government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is something which perfectly respectable politicians, academics, policymakers and UN officials routinely talk about. What is crystallising is not exactly a single world Government, but rather a complicated mixture of aligned institutions, organisations, networks, systems and fora which has sometimes been given the fancy name of a ‘bricolage’ by international relations theorists. There is no centre, but rather a vast and nebulous conglomeration.
This does not mean, though, that global government (or ‘global governance’, as it is more commonly known) is emerging organically. It is being purposively directed. Again, this is no conspiracy theory; it is something that the people involved openly discuss – they hide their plans in perfectly plain sight. And this has been going on for a long time. In the early 1990s, when the Cold War had drawn to a close, the UN convened something called the Commission on Global Governance, which released a final report – called ‘Our Global Neighbourhood‘ – in 1995. It makes for fascinating reading as a kind of ‘playbook’ for what has followed in the field in the 30 years since – establishing as it does a clear rhetorical and argumentative pattern in favour of the global governance project that is repeated to this day.
The basic idea is as follows. In the olden days, when “faith in the ability of Governments to protect citizens and improve their lives was strong”, it was fine for the nation-state to be ‘dominant’. But now the world economy is integrated, the global capital market has vastly expanded, there has been extraordinary industrial and agricultural growth and there has been a huge population explosion. Ours is therefore a “more crowded, interdependent world with finite resources”. And this means we need “a new vision for humanity” which will “galvanise people everywhere to achieve higher levels of cooperation in areas of common concern and shared destiny” (these “areas of common concern” being “human rights, equity, democracy, meeting basic material needs, environmental protection, and demilitarisation”). We need, in short, “an agreed global framework for actions and policies to be carried out at appropriate levels” and a “multifaceted strategy for global governance”.
This is not difficult reasoning to parse. The central argument can be summarised as follows: global governance is necessary because the world is globalising, and that brings with it global problems that need solving collectively. And the logic must be impeccable in the minds of those who are engaged in the global governance project, because what they say has remained essentially the same ever since. Hence, if we fast forward from 1995 to 2024, we find world leaders finalising a revised draft of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s proposed ‘Pact for the Future’, a memorandum of guiding principles for global governance which will be the culmination of his ‘Our Common Agenda‘ project, launched in 2021. While there is a bit more meat on the bone in this document than there may have been in Our Global Neighbourhood in terms of policy, we see a more-or-less identical argument playing out.
So, once again, we are reminded in this document that we live in “a time of profound global transformation” in which we face challenges that are “deeply interconnected” and “far exceed the capacity of any single state alone”. Since our problems can “only be addressed collectively” we therefore need “strong and sustained international cooperation guided by trust and solidarity” – stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. Even the substantive concerns at the heart of the ‘Pact for the Future’ are largely unchanged from those cited in ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’: human rights, equity, poverty and sustainable development, the environment, peace and security – the familiar litany. The only thing that has really changed is that in 2024 there has been layered on top a tone of alarmism: “we are confronted by a growing range of catastrophic and existential risks”, the reader is told, “and if we do not change course, we risk tipping irreversibly into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown”. Better get the washing in, then.
To return to my summary from earlier on, the picture being painted by ‘Our Common Agenda’ and the ‘Pact for the Future’ is then just a slightly more elaborate copy of what was sketched out in ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’: globalisation causes certain problems to emerge that have to be governed globally, and therefore we need, so to speak, to be globally governed. And this is presented as a fait accompli; it is indeed “common sense”, as the Secretary-General calls it in ‘Our Common Agenda’. Governing globally is necessary because there are global problems, and that is that – how could one imagine things could be otherwise?
This all brings to mind Michel Foucault’s account of the emergence of the state in early modernity. Foucault describes that emergence as being, in essence, an epistemological or metaphysical phenomenon rather than a political or social one. For the medieval mind, the world’s significance was spiritual – it was a staging post before Rapture, and what mattered was salvation. The world was therefore not so much an empirical phenomenon as a theological one – it was governed not by physics but by “signs, prodigies, marvels and monstrosities that were so many threats of chastisement, promises of salvation, or marks of election”. It was not something to be altered, but was rather a “system of obedience” to God’s will.
However, beginning in the early modern period, there began a great epistemological rupture: it became possible to understand the world as having an existence independent of God, and being organised therefore by what we would nowadays call science. Now, all of a sudden (though obviously the story played out over many generations) the world became something that had temporal rather than spiritual significance, and the people in it began to be seen as not merely souls awaiting the Second Coming, but populations whose material and moral conditions could be improved by action in the world itself. And this meant that people began to imagine that a ruler’s duty was not just to be a sovereign but to ‘govern’ in the sense of making things better in this life rather than the next.
The state as we understand it today, according to Foucault, emerged within these reflections – the apparatus of armies, taxation, courts and so on all existed before this period, but it was only once government was imagined as having the role of governing that it became possible to think about and speak of the state as such; it was only then that it became a “reflective practice”. It thus became:
An object of knowledge (connaissance) and analysis… part of a reflected and concerted strategy, and… began to be called for, desired, coveted, feared, rejected, loved and hated.
The point that Foucault was keen to emphasise, though, was that while states undoubtedly existed and governed, the state was just an “episode” in government and would – the implication obviously follows – some day be superseded. To repeat: the epistemic break ushered in by early modernity, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and so on transformed the world into an empirical phenomenon, not just particular chunks of territory, and it therefore contained within it the seed of a concept of global or world government: a future in which all of ‘creation’, so to speak, could be brought under the same shared project of material and moral improvement.
Government, then, is not something which the State does per se, but rather something which at a particular period of time simply happened to utilise the state as its instrument. Government is in essence an epistemic phenomenon – it is that activity which conceives of the world as its field of action, as something to be known, understood, studied, manipulated and improved, in the absence or irrelevance of God. At one stage its ambition was limited territorially, chiefly because of technological constraint, but there is no inherent reason for that limit, and as technology has improved such that the globe can now be relatively easily traversed physically and communicatively, so that limitation has disappeared and government is free to imagine its project as genuinely global.
That goes a long way to explaining the first part of the conceptual dynamic that plays out in respect of the global governance project: government can now imagine the world, in a very literal sense, to be something that human reason can know and act upon, and thereby improve. As the preamble to the ‘Pact for the Future’ has it, “advances in knowledge, science, technology and innovation, if properly and equitably managed, could deliver a breakthrough to a better and more sustainable future for all… a world that is safe, sustainable, peaceful, inclusive, just, equal, orderly and resilient”. To repeat: governing is that activity which conceives of the world as its field of action, as something to be known, understood, studied, manipulated and improved, in the absence or irrelevance of God.
To understand the second part of the conceptual dynamic underlying global governance – the fact that that there are global problems that make it absolutely necessary for global governance to exist, and act – we only need to carefully read Machiavelli. Foucault puts Machiavelli at the centre of the story he tells in regard to government and the state, because Machiavelli brings the medieval or pre-modern way of thinking to a resounding end; he asks no theological questions but treats ruling as something that is done only in the name of temporal concerns. He is not interested in the next life; he is interested in this one.
And in particular he is interested in providing advice to a ruler who is taking charge of something new, or afresh – not a ruler who is established but one who has founded, usurped or conquered his throne. Hence, at the very beginning of The Prince, Machiavelli tells us – these are more or less the first words out of his mouth, as it were:
I say, then, that in hereditary states accustomed to the rule of their Prince’s family, there are far fewer difficulties in maintaining them than in new states, for it is sufficient simply not to break ancient customs, and then to suit one’s actions to unexpected events. In this way, if such a Prince is of ordinary ability he will always maintain his state… It is [only] in the new principality that difficulties arise.
So Machiavelli was not interested in providing advice to rulers who were simply maintaining the status quo; his advice was going to be provided to those who set out to rule a new principality. And here the advice is absolutely clear – the new ruler, one who does not inherit his position but somehow comes to occupy it, needs to justify his position somehow; he needs a reason why he should be in charge in the first place, and why he should remain in place. Hence, very simply and straightforwardly:
A wise ruler [in such a position] must think of a method by which his citizens will need the state and himself at all times and in every circumstance. Then they will always be loyal to him.
Governing in modernity, then – in which ‘princes’ will no longer be able to simply point to hereditary or religious justifications for their existence, and are therefore always new in the Machiavellian sense – requires what I once called a “discourse of vulnerability“. It is imperative that it presents its own existence as indeed imperative, so that can maintain its status. It always needs to be making the citizens loyal, through having an account of itself as necessary. And this means discursively constructing the vulnerable population as always in need of government for succour.
You will no doubt have joined the dots already. Since the state is a mere ‘episode’ of government, and since government will necessarily expand its ambition to the entire globe, the same logic underpinning Machiavelli’s discourse of vulnerability in the context of the modern state will also of course hold true in the global arena. It will in short be necessary for global governance to insist precisely on its own necessity at every turn: since we face all sorts of problems that are “deeply interconnected” and “far exceed the capacity of any single state alone”, and since especially we “risk tipping irreversibly into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown” if these problems are not solved, then a global governance framework simply has to come into existence and govern the globe on our behalf. And thus it retains our loyalty and legitimates itself. This is what it governs for: to present government as necessary – globally.
Now that we understand the nature of this discourse, then, we are in a position to subject it to critique. And we can do this across three axes.
First, we can ask: are the problems identified in global governance circles actually not in the capacity of any single state alone to manage on its own behalf? Or might it be the case that individual states, responsible to their electorates and engaged in the national interest, are better placed to deal with crises that arise than nebulous, unaccountable and opaque networks of global governance actors?
I have on my bookshelf here a collection titled Legitimacy in Global Governance: Sources, Processes and Consequences, edited by Jonas Tallberg and put out by the University of Lund in 2018; its opening paragraph – absolutely standard in academic work of this kind – lists “climate change, internet communications, disease epidemics, financial markets, cultural heritage, military security, trade flows and human rights” as sources of global problems, and includes “uncoordinated climate policies, a fragmented internet, perennial financial crises, transcultural misunderstanding, arms proliferation, trade protectionism and human rights abuses” as the likely results of failing to set up appropriate institutions of global governance accordingly. Well, we might very well ask – are “trade flows” a “global challenge” requiring global coordination through the WTO, or something that individual elected governments should determine for themselves, acting perhaps through bilateral agreements? Is “transcultural misunderstanding” something that we really need global governance to manage on our behalf? Is “military security” not quintessentially a task which sovereign nation states pursue on behalf of their populations?
Second, we can ask: is it true that the problems which purportedly necessitate global governance would lead to “permanent crisis and breakdown” without it? Or is it perhaps more plausible to say that an interconnected world (and it is doubtlessly true that the world is more interconnected than it has ever been in human history) is simply going to be characterised by insoluble problems that are best dealt with as contingencies by individual states? For example, is the likelihood of pandemic disease something that global governance needs to exist in order to control, or is it just a fact of life in the modern era which is best responded to through the plans of state governments based on their particular needs and resources, on an ad hoc basis?
And third – and most importantly – we can ask: is global governance in itself a risk, or a factor which exacerbates existing risks rather than ameliorates them? On the one hand, there is no doubt that global governance, which has a tendency to crystallise groupthink among a relatively thin sliver of globalised political, academic, third sector and business circles, can lead to the worldwide, or near-worldwide, imposition of very foolish public policy. The Covid lockdowns are of course the paradigmatic example of this. To this extent global governance is inherently fragilising: it puts all of the policy eggs in one basket, and thus massively amplifies the threat of breakage.
But on the other hand, the very project of global government brings with it particular, unique risks which global governance enthusiasts naturally tend to overlook. In a recent interview with the Triggernometry podcast, Peter Thiel makes something like this point, in his observation that the biggest risk of all which humanity faces is probably a totalitarian world government which, precisely because it covers the whole world, cannot be escaped. This is the real threat posed by government as such (remembering that it is the state which is the tool of government and not vice versa), and, in representing the extinction of human freedom, it would be far more damaging than any individual pathogen, trade war, environmental disaster or financial crisis.
The question which we really need to ask, in other words, is not whether there are risks that come into existence as a result of the world becoming more interconnected, but rather what those risks really are. And sensible people would come to the conclusion that they are in fact political rather than genuinely ‘existential’ – they come not from the realm of the exogenous but rather emerge from the very project of managing existential risk through global governance itself. To put things very bluntly, a future of “permanent crisis and breakdown” is much more likely to emerge from authoritarian attempts to stave off such a future than the emergence of particular events (pandemics, financial crises, environmental disaster, etc.) in themselves. Our problem, in other words, is government – understood, at the risk of repeating myself, as that activity which conceives of the world as its field of action, as something to be known, understood, studied, manipulated and improved, in the absence or irrelevance of God – and that is precisely a problem that global governance is uniquely incapable of solving.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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I am sure our Ukrainian correspondent will be along shortly to offer his most gracious apologies.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/pact-future-planetary-technocracy-global-crises-global-corporatocracy/5864483
I posted this earlier in the News Roundup. A long article but it does provide a wealth of information on what Global Government is all about.
It’s the biggest risk we face by far because by its very nature it is not accountable to anyone- they can’t be thrown out. That’s obviously the appeal to these people- that and the God complex. If you were a politician or “leader” of some kind you’d quite fancy a succession of well paid sinecures that the voters couldn’t sack you from
… and worse, there will be a one size fits policy throughout the world, so no way to compare and contrast other ways of doing things nor judge how well we are doing. It will be a dictatorship of do as we say or else.
Yes the point about comparisons is an excellent one
It’s a question of value to us. While there are obvious, and less obvious, benefits from a degree of global standards, excessive enforcement of them can be inimical to the concept of innovation and ensuing benefits.
I do not believe you fully understand the grotesque, wholly encompassing nature of the Totalitarian endeavour. It is not a world we would want to live in. Think 1984 plus worst nightmare. On steroids.
I don’t want global standards. I want accountability. I want to be able to sack who it is that governs me, and cause to be sacked people working for an organisation I fund if they don’t deliver what I am paying for. Anyway, do you seriously think that the people who are pushing world government are concerned with “benefits” from “global standards”?
Quite. I think some people are still making their way to what’s it’s all about though. And once you get there it’s such a brain-f*ck that the easiest thing to do is to reject it as plausible.
Wow, you’re clearly just not getting it
The idea of global governance is to force all nations to work cooperatively and in unison, as expressed by institutions such as the UN or EU. But such wishful thinking does not really materialize, as typified by exactly these institutions.
Governments, whether global or national, are run by politicians. Politicians are people who strive for recognition, live for publicity, fight for leadership, and are driven by a need to exert power and decide over others – in other words, in general, the worst of society!
My father used to say the best Prime Minister would be the one that had to be dragged screaming into office. A successful businessman will prefer to continue in business. Anyone enjoying a satisfying profession will prefer to remain in that profession. Nobody ‘in their right mind’ wants to become a politician.
Clearly, there are politicians whose ideals are to serve and better society – Andrew Bridgen comes to mind – but there is a clear danger that a majority, especially if unsuccessful in their chosen career, may wish to serve and promote some contemporary ideology, particularly if convinced the population is too ignorant to recognize the ideology’s supposed importance.
Thus large populations can easily be coerced to succumb to ideals which little interest, let alone benefit them: globalism, uncontrolled immigration, DEI, climate change, forced medical interventions, commercial sanctions, wars.
In my opinion, we need a better selection process for politicians if we wish to achieve better governments.
I think we also people to be a lot more cynical about politicians, and to expect a lot less from the state in return for the state getting out of our lives as much as possible.
Absolutely. The head of Germany’s Foreign Office (and leader of the Green Party) is famous for once saying that peace negotiations with Putin were unthinkable as long as he did not change his course by 360°, which had the Russians rolling in the aisles (she obviously meant 180°). It was not a slip of the tongue since she repeated 360° twice more. How can Germany’s chief diplomat and leader of the country’s foreign policy be so lacking in basic education?
“The Covid lockdowns are of course the paradigmatic example of this [very foolish public policy]”. How myopic! Covid was a cruelly-calculated, globally-coordinated hoax, a “plandemic, clearly judged such by Reiner Fuellmich and his large team of experts in their 2022 model trial on Covid-19 Crimes Against Humanity, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
The alleged global threats to humanity asserted by the globalist establishment are not real threats at all, they are confected threats with the ulterior purpose of wrecking western economies and forcing the people into serfdom via digital straitjackets.
The main threat to this country is the United Nations which is at the centre of all our oppressions, be it the climate change hoax via its subsidiary IPCC, fake “plandemics” via its subsidiary WHO and mass immigration via its subsidiary IOM. We need to talk about withdrawing from the UN and all its evil works.
Our current situation is, let us not forget, a continuation of the C1984 Scamdemic within Agenda 2030, and in this country we are now being pushed very aggressively towards complete societal breakdown and civil war.
If those Deagell forecasts are right…Christ!
To paraphrase a 20th century revolutionary: Who will free us from government?
The bricolage of the functioning of government-as-activity being like the strands of subterranean micro fungi that link every tree in a forest to every other.
Have the globalists considered that there might be a religion that still conceives of the world in spiritual terms? One that has, in some expressions at least, an ambiguous view of the ‘laws of kings’.
Our government is working for Satan.
Great Article———-But who gets to choose this Global Government? —-The answer is NO ONE. It is a Technocratic Coup by the Liberal Progressive (Communist) blob. Capitalism that brought prosperity to half the world is to be replaced by Marxism with the Technocrats in total control of all the wealth and resources.
Are the capitalists – who want us to be slavish consumers – and the marxist technocrats – who want a minimal slave population to do their dirty work – truly aligned? Surely the conflict between the desire for consumers and the desire to preserve the planet for themselves is something we can exploit.
Good point. I would though argue that we haven’t had experienced genuine capitalism for a while now. We appear to live in an age of corporatism rather than capitalism.
Government-as-activity that spans the globe is akin to the pantheistic idea of the spirit of God as the sole force that animates everything.
Any news on how the WHO plan to choreograph a monkeypox scare into the US elections? Or is a new Covid variant ready for release?
The Monkeypox scare got laughed out of court. They’re now working on Bird Flu.
We used to have Government by consent; that is what democracy and the peaceful transition of power represented. We used to have policing by consent.
Now we have neither.
We effectively live in a Dictatorship of detached and self-selecting Elite, both Globalist and National. And the only way they can retain control is to operate a Police State. That is what we are becoming.
We are already in a Police State. Harry Miller is clear on this and I have a lot of respect for his focus on that topic. See his recent interview on the Together channel:
https://www.youtube.com/live/CIQabx8oO8Q
You just need to read H.G.Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, to understand what’s going on.
It’s all there: technocratic government by “experts”, control of population through pandemics, elimination of national identities and religions, and a limit on the global population to 1 or 2 billion.
It even mentions the year 2030.
When you read around the literature, it’s very interesting to see how often this date pops up. As well as being baked in to the UN’s Agenda2030, it was mentioned by Keynes, and just the other day, by Elon Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820799076310352124
The big irony is that with Wells it’s never entirely clear whether he was writing a blueprint, a warning, or a satire, or actually all three at the same time.
Definitely another way to bypass democratic systems of government.
Just as we have seen with all the woke and DEI nonsense which none of us voted for.
Excellent article – thank you.
When Michel Foucault describes the emergence of the state in early modernity as being, in essence, an epistemological or metaphysical phenomenon, is he referring to a postmodern or a rational epistemology? Given his status as a leading postmodernist, I guess the former, in which case, given that ideology’s disdain for logic and evidence, and for reality and reason, we should be wary of his analysis, to say the least.