Much of this issue of the New Statesman is devoted to an ambitious - and, some may think, foolish - project. It is a "plan for the world" (starting on page 17), inspired by the "plan for Britain" published by Picture Post in January 1941, at the height of the Blitz. Though it would be absurd to stretch the parallels very far, there are some similarities between 1941 and 2001. Picture Post observed then that Britons had been "forced into an acknowledgement of our dependence on each other". This month, Tony Blair told the Labour conference that "there is a coming together; the power of community is asserting itself". And the darkest, most desperate days are often those when it is best to think ahead: "to reflect, consider and change", to quote Mr Blair again. Picture Post insisted that its plan - the beginning of the debate that led to Beveridge and the Attlee government - was "not something outside the war, or something after the war". Rather, it was "an essential part of our war aims . . . indeed, our most positive war aim". In the same spirit, Mr Blair spoke of how a humanitarian coalition was just as important as the military coalition, if the war on terrorism was to be prosecuted successfully.

Scepticism - both about Mr Blair and about our plan - may be unseemly, but it is reasonable. "Plan" is itself a very 1940s word, later discredited by its associations with the worst excesses of Stalin and Mao, and, nearer to home, with tower blocks and soulless city centres. To read the Picture Post now is to marvel at an innocent faith in the wisdom and benevolence of officialdom. "The new Britain must be planned," proclaimed the headline above an article by Maxwell Fry, a young architect. A list of "what we want" included "everybody to live in cheerful, healthy conditions, which only proper planning can achieve". Picture Post could draw not only on this now lost belief in planning, but also on what it called "common ground": for example, that Britain needed drastic changes in its health and education systems. Read the articles in this issue, however, and you will see that many of them would be anathema to a large body of established, particularly American, opinion. To that school of thought, there is no need for World Social Organisations, international legal aid and medicine funds, Tobin taxes or global labour regulations (to take just a few of our contributors' proposals); it is necessary only that the whole world embraces the principles of liberal democracy and free markets. Equally, many on the left would object that new international institutions and funds would become further instruments of US imperialism. Their plan for a better world would start with an end to US support for Israel, a halt to the bombing of Iraq, and withdrawal of US troops to their home bases.

There are two other reasons for scepticism. The first is that the kind of embryonic world government that emerges from our contributors' proposals would have an inbuilt tendency to take decisions ever further away from the people they directly affect. The EU experience is instructive: it draws more and more powers to itself, largely because a free trade area requires constant regulation to prevent member states taking unfair advantage through, for example, low employment or environmental standards or currency devaluations. At the same time, it has failed to design any credible form of democratic accountability; indeed, it is a characteristic of all existing international bodies that most people, even in the sophisticated west, would struggle to explain what they do, much less how to influence them.

Second, a move towards world government, with enforceable laws and taxes, implicitly accepts the Fukuyama thesis: that history has come to an end and that no new poli-tical ideas are possible. Where there are only nation states, those who dissent from government, for whatever reason, can go into exile and find a regime and a society more to their taste. There can be no exile from what politicians already call "the international community", unless you want to end up like North Korea. A 22nd-century Lenin, inspired by a 21st-century Marx, would need to find a Finland Station with interplanetary rockets.

But having acknowledged these objections, we have to consider the alternative: to go on as we are. In many senses, we already have world government in the form of such institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, the G8, the World Trade Organisation, to say nothing of the powerful multinationals. They do not seem to oppress us because politicians run the international bodies in western interests, while the multinationals provide, at low prices, the goods we want (or think we want), along with the profits that fund our pensions. But their decisions bear heavily on people in poorer parts of the world, who have to put up, for example, with arrangements for water supply, education, health and other public services that are dictated by the IMF or its corporate partners. When we talk about the impracticality or undesirability of world government, what we really mean is that we don't want to give the world's poor a say in the decisions that affect them. Like Britain's pre-1832 aristocratic elite, we don't want to extend the franchise. Still less do we want to endanger our luxurious lifestyles, which even 19th-century aristocrats would have envied.

And all that taxation and regulation? Several of our contributors argue that free migration and genuine free trade offer the best prospects for ending world poverty. Many on the right would agree. But where the left differs from the right is in arguing that such freedoms can only work alongside adequate international regulation and a level playing field. Unlimited migration to Britain, for example, would ultimately wreck the welfare state. Free trade threatens the weakest with destitution. We need adequate health and education to give everybody a chance to compete in a market economy; we need regulation of employment conditions and pollution to prevent the unscrupulous putting everybody else out of business; we need redistribution to prevent the extreme poverty that can lead to antisocial alienation and crime. Britain accepted these truths in the 1940s; the world has to accept them now.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website