We constantly hear that the world is chaotic and needs the guiding hand of government to steer it; that international law is toothless against evil regimes; and that the better angels of our nature demand that we take steps to rein in the abuses of the nation-state system. It is undeniable that nation-states often behave in a callous and brutal fashion, but for all the abuses that nation-states commit – and which the political class incessantly invokes as justification for global governance – a world with a single and unrivaled sovereign represents a cure far worse than the disease. National sovereignty and international competition are essential to the survival of human civilization, for they limit the reach and strength of any single government, and they compel governments to face external enemies in a creative struggle whereby good ideas have a chance to outlast and defeat bad ones. If Weimar Germany of the 1920s and ’30s had been a global democracy rather than a merely national one, Hitler’s election to high office and subsequent seizure of absolute power would have spelled a worldwide Third Reich rather than a localized dictatorship that, fortunately, could be resisted with outside military force. In a uniformly governed world, any opponent of such tyranny would be merely internal; he would be labeled as an outlaw; and he would be imprisoned or executed. One can run this “thought experiment” to envision any number of nightmarish outcomes, such as a global Mao Tse-tung, a global Pol Pot, or a global Stalin.

We know for a fact that governments kill far more of their own people than each others’: during the twentieth century alone, governments murdered roughly 160 million of their own citizens in bloody orgies of “democide,” while killing only a fraction of that number through international warfare. So if the nation-state system seems lawless and vicious, it surely cannot match the potential brutality of a world under a single government. In light of this knowledge, it is folly to exchange a world of divided sovereignties, however imperfect, for a single worldwide sovereignty, however promising. One would be just as foolish to consolidate all of the world’s criminal organizations into a single unrivaled syndicate on the belief that this would reduce thievery and violence.

Yet the political class wishes to wrap us in the chains of global government on the slender inference that we can make such a government “good,” and on the even more slender inference that such a government will remain “good.” This assertion falls to pieces merely upon considering what these same people believe constitutes good government: the Leviathan state unbounded by the rule of law, whose power to legislate, regulate, tax, spend, and destroy continues to swell with no end in sight. A glimpse at history likewise disproves the political class’s rhetoric, for the precious few governments we can honestly rank as admirable did not remain so for very long. Mankind is far from perfect and will remain as such, and any government he constructs will eventually regress to the mean and indulge in the affronts to life, liberty, and property that typify the story of civilization. We would be much wiser to evolve by allowing for the birth and death of diverse governments, just as nature evolves by allowing for the birth and death of diverse individuals. In short, better to have several hundred bites at the apple than just one.

Sadly, the “mainstream” debate concerning international affairs ignores asking whether a global centralization of power should occur and concerns itself solely with how it should occur, much the same way that political discourse degenerated within the United States. “Conservatives” call for global rule under American influence, pursuing their vision of “democracy” by way of mass murder and violations of bedrock norms governing the initiation of military force. On the other side of the coin, “liberals” pursue a softer, more systemized version of hegemony by promoting international bureaucracies that will impose “human rights” and “environmentalist” principles that, when viewed up close, amount to little more than warmed-over Marxist schemes for micromanaging our lives and depriving us of any choices or dignity. Both the “conservative” and “liberal” sides of this loaded debate discard the wisdom that all governments are a menace unless offset by other competing governments. Forgotten is the lesson that the best way to curtail abuses of power is to disperse power far and wide, depositing it into so many hands that large-scale transgressions lack the raw material to take shape. As shown by the tragic experience of the United States – a nation conceived in liberty but increasingly bereft of it now – internal legal restraints do not prevent the accumulation and abuse of political power, no matter how ingeniously those restraints may be devised. Only external restraints suffice, and only in a world of multiple sovereignties do we have any hope of continuing the march of human progress.

One may wonder how to avert global hegemony, especially since the awesome forces of modern government constantly portray it as necessary and pursue it with unrelenting vigor. A good start is to take care of matters close to home, as discussed in my previous book with regard to undoing the disproportionate and unconstitutional power concentrated in Washington, D.C. Achieving that objective alone would spark an explosion of competition and creativity worldwide, as the current network of bribery, corruption, and coercion emanating from the federal government would dissipate. Apart from that, the truth of the matter is we don’t really have to stop the process at all, for it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Societies thrive on a unique sense of shared history, as well as on a sense of differentiation from one another; “global society,” however, has no cultural ethos with which to define itself, and no alien culture from which to differentiate itself. The absence of known, hostile societies beyond the sphere of our world frustrates the cohesive spirit that might otherwise give birth to a worldwide identity or corresponding political order.