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21 - What Could Go Wrong?

from Part V - The Long-Term Goal: Envisioning a Mature System of Global Governance for the Twenty-Second Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Michael D. Bess
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

Building and maintaining a global federal government won’t be easy: plenty of things could go awry along the way, and plenty more could go sour even after the government was up and running. The world’s peoples may respond to severe climate change by retrenching into regional or national enclaves. The global legislature could become gridlocked in a manner similar to the UN during the Cold War. One nation or group of nations could succeed in gaining unilateral control over the global government, resulting either in an Orwellian superstate or in a catastrophic planetary civil war. These scenarios form a perfectly real and plausible possibility for our collective future – and the coming generations will need to be ever-vigilant in their efforts to prevent them from happening.

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Chapter
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Planet in Peril
Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them
, pp. 318 - 323
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • What Could Go Wrong?
  • Michael D. Bess, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book: Planet in Peril
  • Online publication: 13 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009160315.022
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  • What Could Go Wrong?
  • Michael D. Bess, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book: Planet in Peril
  • Online publication: 13 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009160315.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • What Could Go Wrong?
  • Michael D. Bess, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book: Planet in Peril
  • Online publication: 13 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009160315.022
Available formats
×