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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My starting point and probably finishing point would be that nothing should be done about “misinformation” of any kind, same goes for “fake news”, “hate speech” etc. Limit restrictions to libel, slander and anything criminal e.g. direct incitement to commit a specific crime, threats etc. And I suppose do something about porn and extreme violence.
If only porn and extreme violence is allowed to be censored, everything some backroom entity disapproves of will become porn or extreme violence. The procedure of someone being an anonymous judge & jury whose decisions need no justifications, who won’t allow the judged to state their view of the situation and against whose decisions no redress is possible is fundamentally broken. Tweaking the set of conditions enabling such an entity to spring into action won’t help.
Yes, I would not advocate censoring them per se, but maybe consider warnings or safe search features or something on sites that were intended for family consumption, though I tend to think in general that adults should be able to look at whatever they feel like and parents can police their kids consumption of the internet, TV, books, whatever.
For this to work sensibly, it needs to be implemented on the consumer and not on the producer side because the information to do the latter is simply not available. Ideally, platform providers would tag content suitably and cooperating clients would then refuse to display it if configured to do so. That’s obviously not bulletproof, but nothing is. Such a system is still open to abuse, the example would be certain UK ISPs classifying TCW as adult content. But at least, it’s not abuse-by-design.
Indeed. Given how important free speech is I would err on the side of people seeing content they shouldn’t rather than people being prevented from seeing stuff. And the cases of people seeing content they shouldn’t are in my mind limited to keeping kids away from porn and extreme violence and the like.
Like a fox asking for suggestions on running the henhouse.
I never have, nor ever will have any involvement with Twitter, Facebook, et al. Easy.
You have no involvement, but almost everyone else does.
I have no debt, but my customers do.
I keep enough time between my vehicle and the vehicle in front, but when they all pile into each other, I am caught up in it, and can’t move backwards or forwards.
The actions and ideas of the masses affect us all. The ideas of individual responsibility and personal freedom are the way out of this and need constant reinforcement. This task always falls to the little guys, because the big guys have no interest in your personal freedom.
PS this is not an advert for socialism. Defo not.
The mission of the Facebook Oversight Board is to ensure that Facebook content moderators don’t accidentally stray into the territory of insufficient wokeness, ie, it’s a last resort for complaints about content which wasn’t censored. Other cases won’t be handled by it, no matter how flagrantly a moderator decision violated stated Facebook policy. That’s presumably based on the theory that excessive censorship cannot do harm, only too lenient one.
What a terrific response, but then again you might expect the founder of something called the Free Speech Union to be able to articulate a good argument for free speech.
I’m not sure Facebook will pay much attention to it, but it certainly inspired me.
I love the quote from the WSJ comment piece.
It is starting to dawn on social media companies that the onus of responsibility is about to be kicked into their court as regards to content moderation due to the demands of the impossibly complex Online Safety Bill. Having very little idea about how to go about implementing these confusing regulations (identifying the unidentifiable vulnerable individuals likely to be harmed by unidentifiable harmful information), it looks like they’ve come up empty-handed and resorted to asking the general public for advice on this!
My blunt recommendation would be to go with the principle of Occam’s Razor and simply allow people to talk bollocks on facebook and twitter. Perhaps we should be taking social media posts a little less seriously – most of what gets discussed on these platforms comes under this category anyway. It’s clear, as Toby points out here, that it’s mainly the right-of-centre views and and the holders of these views that are targeted for demolition. If it’s mostly nonsense, as I firmly believe most social media posts are (I would describe many as the culmination of anger, alcohol consumption, and virtue-signalling bigotry), then what we currently see is certain types of nonsense being tolerated at the expense of other types of nonsense.
I don’t know how these content-moderating algorithms sleep at night!
The sound sleep of those self-justified by self-rightousness, probably.
Brilliant.
All parts of it. I think it would work better as a whole if it was shortened somewhat.
I wish I could be brief, but I just don’t have the time!
Hip hip hooray, Toby! Great letter. And the right strategy, to refuse to answer their facile questions.
Well said Toby. But perhaps the best lines for us to take away from this is right at the beginning:
“I’m not going to respond to the questions directly. The way they’ve been drafted, it’s as if Meta is taking it for granted that some suppression of health misinformation is desirable during a pandemic – because of the risk it might cause “imminent physical harm” – and what you’re looking for is feedback on how censorious you ought to be and at what point in the course of a pandemic like the one we’ve just been through you should ease back on the rules a little.”
Good point. We all have to be very careful answering surveys because they are all open to misinterpretation. For example (say):
Do you agree strongly, agree somewhat, don’t have a view, disagree somewhat or disagree strongly with the following sentence: “there is some content on social media sites that should be censored?”
Most normal people would answer that “agree somewhat” or “agree strongly” because there are some sites that should be censored (eg snuff movies). But the next thing you know the authors of the survey are claiming “95% of respondents said there should be some censorship of social media”. The trouble for us is that if we don’t respond then the survey results are even worse.
I disagree with the implied statement that existing practices in this area would be basically ok and just needs some tweaking, ie, It’s generally fine provided I get to decide what should be deleted. There are legal procedures for dealling with so-called illegal content and these exist for a reason (basically, humans are partisan and fallible).
Excellent piece Toby as usual. But that’s short and punchy?!!!😀
Brandeis, not Brandies
I would like to see what Farcebook has to say about the comments regarding the vaccines Steve Kirsch is getting from medics in the USA who are beginning to speak out, albeit anonymously at the moment. Here is his summary…
1. They are afraid to come out publicly due to intimidation tactics such as loss of job and/or license to practice medicine.
2. Unvaccinated healthcare workers are extremely upset with the medical community. They feel they have been treated unfairly.
3. It is the vaccinated workers who are getting sick with COVID, but it is the unvaccinated who are punished with constant testing, restrictions, and threats of losing their jobs.
4. The COVID shots are a disaster. Even for the elderly which is supposed to be the most compelling use case, death rates in elderly homes went up by a factor of 5 after the shots rolled out. Each time the shots are given, the deaths spike. Nobody is talking publicly about this. It’s not allowed.
5. Doctors are seeing rates of injury and death increase dramatically in all ages of people. The injuries are only happening to the vaccinated. There is no doubt that this is happening but many doctors have so much cognitive dissonance that they don’t see it.
6. One nurse with 23 years of experience says she’s never heard of anyone under 20 dying from cardiac issues until the vaccines rolled out. Now she knows of around 30 stories.
7. Doctors aren’t recording vaccination status in the medical records so that all the deaths are attributed to the unvaccinated.
8. Doctors are deliberately ignoring the possibility that the vaccines could be the cause of all the elevated events. The events are simply all unexplained.
9. Many doctors have either quit or will quit.
10. Some doctors and nurses at top institutions such as Mass General Hospital have falsified vaccine cards. They publicly toe the line and encourage their patients to take the shot knowing full well it is deadly. They value their job more than the lives of their patients. The important thing is they are risking 10 years in jail for doing this. These highly respected medical workers are telling the world that these COVID shots are so dangerous that they are willing to risk 10 years in prison to avoid taking the shot. That’s the message America needs to hear. And if Biden were an honest President, he would call for full amnesty and protection from retaliation for all these cases if people admitted publicly they did this. He’d be amazed at the number of responses he’d get. But he won’t do that because it would be too embarrassing for his administration.
11. Things don’t seem to be getting any better.
12. The medical examiners all over the world are not doing the property tests during an autopsy to detect a vaccine-related death. Without doing the required tests, it is very hard to make an association. There isn’t a single “guidance” document from any medical authority anywhere in the world to do these tests on people who die within 3 months of their last COVID vaccination. This is why no associations are found: they aren’t looking.
13. Doctors are being forced to take other vaccines (such as the HIV vaccine) so the hospital can meet their quota. This was admitted to them.
The article is at: https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/silenced-healthcare-workers-speak
I would love to know how they could label this ‘misinformation’.
Yea its a good response but I find the certainty expressed regards the election misplaced.
I’ve read Rules for Radicals relatively recently, published in 1971, and on page 108 it covers a Democrat politician from Chicago becoming very angry with Alinsky because he ‘doesn’t even bother to vote more than once’.
I have absolutely no evidence for any shenanigans on the day, besides the minor stuff and Maggie Hemingway’s book Rigged, but would I be certain they didn’t do anything?
Absolutely not.
There is motive and past form.
No offence, but Facebook is toxic. Why would any intelligent person use Facebook. I cannot understand it. I also cannot understand why any intelligent person would support a platform which suppresses and censors free speech. That is outright dangerous.