expectations lead to general, indirect long-term benefits being sacrificed in favour
of immediate, tangible and focused pay-offs (1995: 42). The tyranny of modern
democracy, as he calls it, seeks an equality of results, not of contributions (1995:
53). What he refers to as the ‘civil minimum’ is like a drug and takes the form of
broad-based social programmes, welfare, unemployment compensation, public
education, old-age pensions and health insurance. Established political systems have
become the creature of special interests and the poorer districts. Whereas the nation-
state solution assumes a zero-sum game for limited resources, the region-state model,
he argues, open to the global economy, is a ‘plus-sum’ as prosperity is brought in
from without (Ohmae, 1995: 55, 57, 62).
Yet Ohmae notes that huge disparities have opened up – disparities measured
by a factor of 20 or more – between inland and coastal regions in countries like
China. He concedes that the gap between the developed and developing world has
substantially widened. Despite his defence of the ‘trickle-down’ effect – that the
poor ultimately benefit from the prosperity of the rich – he is not only hostile to
democracy, but his argument is basically state-centric throughout. States are seen
as having an unproblematic sovereignty, the European Union is described as a
‘supernation state’, and those worried about the most economically backward areas
of the world are regarded as defending ‘vested interests’ that get in the way of global
logic. Besides, regional states are seen as states that constitute ‘natural economic
zones’ (1995: 80).
It is clear that if so-called globalisation aggravates and deepens inequalities in
the world, then this will generate wars, fundamentalism and, of course, the need
for states. John Gray takes the view that economic liberalisation and religious
fundamentalism go together (1998: 103). Globalisation can only weaken the state
if it cements common interests and allows conflicts of interest to be subject to
governmental sanctions.The case for global government
If globalisation is to be positively conceived – as an opportunity rather than as a
source of violence and division – then it is crucial that we see free-market
fundamentalism and the abstract similarity that it seeks to impose as a distortion
of globalisation. If by globalisation we mean a sense of interconnectedness
between the peoples of the world, then we must distinguish between this and
‘Americanisation’ which inevitably creates a fundamentalist reaction.
Globalisation is a cultural and political as well as an economic phenomenon. It
is not simply that states are losing economic power: their claim to impose a
monopolistic outlook is being more and more openly challenged both within and
between societies. We need to be clear that the case for global government is not
a case for a global state. If we are moving, as Barry Jones supposes, to a world of
‘complex, multi-layered’ public governance (2000: 270), then it is crucial that we
challenge the view that diversity is the same as fragmentation. States will remain
for the foreseeable future, and the case for global government is one in which states
become less important and increasingly devote their energies to governmental
activities, thus gradually transcending themselves. The problem with Kant’s
argument for perpetual peace is that it rests upon a liberal republican notion of a30 Part 1 Classical ideas