You seem to think I’m supporting a single world dictatorship with a single set of laws and a single culture for everyone, while nothing could possibly be further from the truth. I make it pretty clear in my original article that I favor a weak form of transnational governance that weakens national governance and thus strengthens local governance. The fact of the matter is, if done well, nobody is disenfranchised in the system I propose no matter what language the lingua franca may be.
In fact, there will be much greater enfranchisement, since the stronger governance will be more local, meaning people will have more of a say in the government closest to them. A transnational government would literally do nothing more than create a space of completely free trade and free movement of people, the restriction of which only ever benefits the national/state/local governments. The U.S. abandoned the Articles of Confederation in no small part because under them the states were putting up trade barriers and barriers to free movement (including tolls) from other states. The Constitution specifically addressed this, creating a free trade zone among the states through the Interstate Commerce Clause. The result was a more stable U.S. and a much wealthier U.S.
I’ve never made your straw-man claim that there haven’t been governments ruling over communities with a common language. It’s obvious there have been. Starting with our tribal beginnings. However, we’re talking about bigger things than mere communities. Tribes fought tribes, and their war fatalities as a percentage of population truly dwarfs any large-scale wars of which we are familiar. The larger countries have become, embracing more and more peoples with different languages, cultures, and religions, the more peaceful those countries have become. Past empires honestly couldn’t have cared less about what people believed, what they spoke, etc., so long as they paid their taxes and didn’t revolt. And those empires all lasted far, far longer than have any nation-state. This isn’t an argument for empire, of course, but rather me pointing out that governments haven’t at all cared about nationality until recently. And with that interest in nationality have come ethnic cleansing for the sake of ethnic cleansing, immigration and trade restrictions based exclusively on race and ethnicity, and other forms of race-based fearmongering.
None of this is to say that racism didn’t exist in the past. It did. It just wasn’t state policy as it is under nationalism. Nationalism came to replace theocratic governance, and thus anti-immigrant and racist policies came to replace religious intolerance. Of course, there are now countries that combine nationalism with theocracy to create a truly horrendous mix. Doubling down on nationalism isn’t the solution to that problem at all.
In short, transnational governance would be a restriction on what national governments can do, especially regarding trade and immigration. I could immigrate from Kentucky to Mississippi and then to Texas only because the U.S. adopted a transnational Constitution. As the U.S. bizarrely becomes more nationalist, it’s betraying those original transnational origins. We shouldn’t be retreating to an inglorious past once embraced by a Europe now trying to evolve more complex political structures, but rather take our own past as seriously as the E.U. is trying to take it in more fully embracing those transnational characteristics. In the same way that our country wasn’t anti-racist enough at the beginning, but made some early efforts, and has been trying very hard since then to do better, even if we still have a ways to go, our country wasn’t quite transnational enough. The Constitution doesn’t clearly give the Congress the ability to restrict immigration, but it doesn’t explicitly prohibits them doing so, either. Our founding fathers seemed to think that they didn’t need to spell those things out, since anything not included was implied to be excluded. But little did they know the contortions people would make to distort what they did into the very opposite at times.
Globally, I want a very Scottish Scotland, where people who want to embrace the Scottish culture — even if they were born in China — can go to live. I want a very Nigerian Nigeria for the same reason. And a very Texan Texas. Come to Texas if you want to embrace Texan culture. Stay in California if you don’t. But either way, we shouldn’t restrict people’s movement. Let people live where they want to live, whether it’s to be in a culture they appreciate more, or whether they’re simply looking for a job, or whether they want a good neighborhood with good schools. Let everyone be thoroughly franchised at the local level. But democracy for all means both voice and exit — the ability to speak out for change, and the ability to leave when necessary (or if you simply want to go).
