This chapter sketches a potential architecture of global federal government, framing it as the end-goal of a century-long, incremental process of reforms and innovations in governance. Humankind, in this scenario, will be strongly motivated to undertake these innovations because of escalating dangers and crises that can only be handled effectively through stronger forms of global cooperation and coordination. The key challenges here are: revamping the UN Security Council so it more accurately reflects the realities of global economic and military power; replacing the Security Council veto system with a new principle of weighted voting in all UN institutions, so that key policies can be implemented effectively; creating a world constitution to lay out the basic rules and principles through which the system will operate, as well as a world court to adjudicate disputes among the players; and establishing a UN Office for Emerging Technologies, a more dynamic WHO, and a dedicated UN Office for Climate Change Mitigation.

Chapter 1 reviews past scholarly ideals and political realities of a world constitution, focusing on the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations. It sketches out the core claims of the book according to which constitutional trends in world politics must be viewed with realistic skepticism and, in that light, can be understood in terms of a process called constitutionalization. This process does not generate the unified constitutional framework typically associated with national constitutions but manifests itself as an inadvertent by–product of piecemeal international treaty making driven by proximate objectives within issue–specific domains. The chapter then presents the major themes and limitations of the contemporary “constitutionalism beyond the state” debate and establishes how a social scientific perspective can add to this legal debate. It concludes with a preview of the book, emphasizing the main theoretical insights and empirical findings.

The idea of bringing into being supranational organizations to resolve disputes between states has a distinguished lineage, going as far back as Dante Alighieri’s On World Government, Rousseau’s A Project of Perpetual Peace and Kant’s proposal for a federation of nations operating under the rule of law, and eventually evolving into “a perfect civil union of mankind.” The League of Nations was a first attempt to pool national sovereignties together to deal with the problem of war, a milestone in a long process intended to strengthen the effectiveness of mechanisms of international cooperation. The UN was initially conceived as an international entity founded on federalist principles, with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states, but it emerged as a rather less ambitious entity with two fundamental flaws: the principle of one country–one vote in the General Assembly and the veto within the Security Council, both undermining the democratic legitimacy of the organization. The chapter also reviews the concerns raised by Grenville Clark and others who thought that if member countries could not agree upon well-defined powers that they would be willing to yield, no global authority adequate to maintain peace would arise in our time.