The Size Objection to World Government Answered

The size objection is the only true objection that can be made to a world government, as size is the only aspect where world government can be uniquely challenged in a way no other government can. In every other regard, the arguments against and concerns about world government represent only a scaling-up of political issues from the national to the global scale. There is nothing inherently different about a world polity from any other, except two factors: its unprecedented size and the fact that there is nothing external to it.

It is commonly argued that the world is just too large to be governed as a single political entity. But the world as a whole is not at a much greater scale than the largest nations. Countries as vast as 17.1 million sq. km. and with as many as 1.4 billion people are functioning in the national system. The world is only about nine times larger and has six times the population, so there is not that great a difference of scale. And the largest nations of today are regarded as being adequately governed, having stable authority and no constant risk of disintegration. So it does not seem based on present experience that any upper bound on state size has been reached, and the world may be governed equally well. There is also nothing to suggest that there is any such upper threshold in between the largest nation and the world either.

When considering whether size is a formidable challenge in moving from nations to world government, one must also take into account the technological advances of the centuries since the national order came about. Modern transportation has made it feasible to travel to any point in the world in at most a few days, while in communication distance and time have both been eradicated entirely. Political theory and practice are both yet to fully incorporate the implications of this connectivity—but modern technology necessitates a rethink of long-standing ways of political organization. For instance, there may be no need now for a fixed ‘capital city’ in a state or for institutions to be localized.

Yet in the past, even before these technological advances, vast empires and territories were being ruled from distances that took months to travel, and even extended larger in area than any of today’s nations. Examples include the British Empire and the Soviet Union. Compared to that, governing a state the size of the world is hardly a challenge. The equivalent of that today would be more like governing Mars. In this well-connected world, it is actually the absence of any form of global government that is notable, and it is the divided system of nations that seems out of place.

It could be argued that even if the world could be governed as one, it would still not become united socially: humanity is too numerous to ever feel a sense of commonality and unity with so many others. People associate in identity groups like nations to provide a sense of community—but do they? Can any nationalist possibly know personally and interact with a billion, or forty million, or even one million people from the same nation? The influential Dunbar’s number identifies 150 people as the limit of an individual’s stable social relationships. Even though this number is disputed, none of the other research points towards the thousands or millions required for a political community.

The community of a nation or any large identity group is purely imagined; there is no way such a large number could share any real bond. Cosmopolitanism is no more a stretch for individuals than is nationalism just because of its greater scope, for both involve numbers too large for the community to be anything but a mental construct. And there is the potential to change this imagination; such unity could just as well be conjured up in people’s minds for the entire world.

Most of the size-related objections stemming from political theory would also preclude states the size of today’s nations, and constitute not a justification but an objection itself to the national order. Yet what reason do we have for not choosing the alternative of smaller states instead of a world government to the system of nations? The Rousseauan ideal of self-sufficient and homogeneous microstates may be conceivable in a primitive agricultural society, but not with today’s diversified economy and global flows. If the microstates were to be interdependent as the present world, then it would be unfeasible for them to restrict flows and to even govern; surely no one wants to pass through three passport controls just on their commute to work. If relations between microstates become hostile then humanity would suffer catastrophic losses; if they are amicable then these states would unite out of functional necessity. Microstates have faded from present political theory for good reason, because they are just not suited to today’s world.

The agency of a state and its government is related to the proportion of activity occurring within the state and activity occurring between/across states. A government can fully regulate internal activities but does not have complete control over interstate activity, often only being able to restrict it or regulate it within its jurisdiction. External interactions represent a loss of power and agency for governments, and the smaller states are the greater is the poorly governed ‘grey area’ of interactions between them. A practical minimum constraint on state size is for it to encompass enough internal activity as to maintain authority without being overshadowed by interstate activities. As the scale of human interactions grows (both in terms of distance and magnitude), so must the size of states. Globalization has left an increasingly large void that requires global regulation, and the time has come for a world government, which will have the most agency of any possible state system since there is nothing external to it.

Within the existing framework of nation-states, empirically there is nothing to indicate that size, both in terms of area and population, has anything to do with governance. Consider the correlation coefficients between each of the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (2021), and area and population (2022) for 204 countries and territories:

	Area	Population
Government Effectiveness	0.033968	0.044724
Rule of Law	-0.025529	-0.029859
Regulation	-0.000134	-0.033375
Accountability	-0.080294	-0.109886
Corruption	-0.036944	-0.052295
Political Stability	-0.141282	-0.152716

The means of the six Governance Indicators are plotted with area and population below:

It is evident that size has practically no bearing on any of the Governance Indicators. Governance is affected predominantly not by size but by several other factors, and it is more important to get those other factors right. In the discourse around world government, it is time to shift attention to designing the regime and its institutions to ensure effective global governance, rather than worrying about its size.

In the 21st century the size objection has outlived its validity. Conditions have changed drastically since the early theorizing on world government, and yet people continue to use this objection to dismiss world government without consideration. In these conditions of globalization a world government is not an overextension but an appropriate fit to the present and future. In every other sphere of life humanity has been moving towards greater scope, and it is time for government to catch up.