Is There a United Earth Government? | Unveiled

Is There a United Earth Government?

For the last century, international cooperation and cohesion have been major issues. Global unity is seen as a way to ensure peace, stop wars from happening, and improve the lives of people across the planet. But how much of this dream has become a reality?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: is there a United Earth Government?

By a landslide, the closest thing that Earth has to a planet-wide government is the United Nations. There are other international organizations that have interests in particular areas, like the European Union, the African Union, the Union of South American Nations, and so on. But the UN is the biggest and most powerful. There are 195 recognized countries on Earth; while the Union of South American Nations has 12 member states, the European Union has 27, and the African Union has 55, the United Nations has 193! And the two excluded countries, Vatican City and Palestine, still observe UN General Assemblies.

The UN was founded in the wake of the Second World War in 1946, as a replacement for the League of Nations, a similar international organization that was even less powerful than the UN. As such, the League of Nations was unable to prevent World War II – rendering it unfit for purpose. But the UN has enjoyed far more successes, promoting human rights, funding humanitarian projects, and running health programs through the World Health Organization. WHO is credited with eradicating several diseases, including smallpox, polio, and leprosy. More recently, the UN has been an important voice in public health and climate change. It has a multitude of branches with various aims, from tackling child poverty to space exploration.

But the UN also has plenty of issues and has been widely criticized during its existence. One of the biggest problems facing the UN is that many perceive it as undemocratic, able to impose sanctions and even send “peacekeeping” forces into sovereign nations. Five member states hold complete veto power, the US, Russia, the UK, France, and China, countries that have historically had wildly different political systems, goals, and ideologies. The ability to veto has hugely hampered the UN because if something the UN wants to do goes against the interests of even one of these powerful countries, it can be completely derailed. The UN might be good at promoting public health and social programs, but it’s pretty bad at stopping wars and de-escalating conflicts of all types. It’s not an organization held accountable by the public it’s supposed to serve, and UN members nominate one another for different roles rather than being voted on by the public at large – which is why the UN probably doesn’t count as a United Earth Government, though elected world leaders still play a vital role. It has too many problems, and it doesn’t really “govern” anything beyond its own finances .

But someday we might have the need for a United Earth Government created by the Earth’s entire populace. Given the number of stars and exoplanets in the Milky Way, it’s extremely probable that aliens are out there somewhere – they just haven’t contacted us yet. At least, they haven’t contacted us openly. A major reason that aliens might be choosing to leave us alone is that we’re not yet advanced enough to join the galactic community, a so-called “Galactic Federation” of alien races. This could be because we lack the technology to participate in interstellar society, or because we’re too violent and aliens don’t want anything to do with us. Regardless, the existence of a Galactic Federation would necessitate the creation of a United Earth Government to represent the interests of humankind on the galactic stage. Just like national governments are responsible for, among many other things, negotiating with other national governments, a planetary government would be responsible for negotiating with the galactic community as a whole.

Since long before the dawn of the United Nations and even the League of Nations, influential science-fiction writers like Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells have hypothesized about what a world government might look like and how it would work. A United Earth Government could potentially override and replace existing governments, but it’s doubtful that anybody would support an organization like that; nations prize their sovereignty and wouldn’t give it up just to be more palatable to aliens. The more plausible version of a United government would be an additional level of government on top of the ones we already have. Already, countries have small governing bodies like city councils and state legislatures that are superseded by presidents and parliaments. In a nutshell, it would be the UN, but if the UN had actual power beyond imposing economic sanctions and condemning human rights abuses, and ideally if the public could elect its leaders. A United Earth Government wouldn’t need to have total authority over Earth, either. It might exist entirely to represent humans elsewhere in the galaxy, as opposed to truly “unifying” Earth’s many countries. But countries could still certainly have their own national identities, legal systems, economies, resources, trade deals, citizens, and so on – there’s no need to sacrifice any of that.

Another reason a United Earth Government might be useful is if there really aren’t any aliens, but humans spread out and colonize different planets. In this way, we could have a United Earth Government, a United Mars Government, a United Venus Government, a United Kepler-452b Government, and so on. The “Galactic Federation” would exclusively be made up of humans. These many governments would be responsible for managing entire planets and would develop trade agreements between the various outposts. This only really matters if civilians one day end up traveling into space and making their homes on new planets, as opposed to simple scientific missions, but it would be a good way to avoid an expensive Independence War with the humans who live on Mars. The major reasons for the American Revolution were that the Thirteen Colonies didn’t like being controlled by the British Empire and King George III, or paying taxes to them without representation. Suffice it to say, Mars is a lot further away from Earth than Great Britain is from the USA, and it would be good to avoid a long and bloody Martian revolution by letting Mars’s settlers control their own destiny from the beginning.

But how would you actually choose who gets to be a representative for the entire human race? The United Nations is generally controlled by the world’s richest countries since those are the ones, once again, with veto power. Concentrating the power of the United Earth Government in the hands of a few rich countries is something that most of the world would be opposed to. However, even an electoral system where the countries with the biggest populations have the most representation in the UEG would favor these countries to a degree; Russia, China, and the USA all have very large populations as well as being economic superpowers. But a population-based voting system would put other countries in the lead as well, such as India, the world’s second-most populous country, along with Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, and others. This system would represent the majority of Earth’s populace, but it wouldn’t represent all of Earth’s populace – though it might be impossible for any system to do so. If we set the United Earth Government up exactly like the UN only with no vetoes, and representatives elected to it exclusively, every country would be represented, but countries with higher populations wouldn’t have any more power than countries with small ones. Every country deserves to have a voice, but it goes to show that no solution is perfect.

Finally, there’s the actual process of how we would elect a President of Earth. How would every single person on Earth ever find a single presidential candidate that represents our interests? Politics is already polarized even in individual countries, and this would become unimaginably more pronounced if we want one person to serve our entire species. Only if the president’s job is extremely narrow – i.e., their mandate is solely to avoid interstellar wars and nothing else – would we ever reach a consensus.

In a way, the United Nations is functional as a global government, and it even has an Office for Outer Space Affairs that already promotes peace in the cosmos. But no planetwide government would be without its flaws. And that’s what would happen if there was a United Earth Government.