Humanity must constitute a world government to face its great challenges in the 21st Century which consist of: 1) Economic and financial chain crises; 2) Revolutions and social counterrevolution around the globe; 3) Cascade Wars; 4) World overpopulation; 5) Deadly pandemic; 6) Extreme climate changes; 7) organized crime; and, 8) Threats from space, whose global actions to neutralize them are impossible to be carried out by national states alone and by current international institutions. The risk that this world government could be led by the same great military and economic powers is real. It is preferable, however, to take this risk than to do nothing. We must take this risk by working and betting on the possibility that a truly democratic government can be constituted on a global scale in the future.

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CHAOS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS DEMANDS A GLOBAL
GOVERNMENT
Fernando Alcoforado *
The international system has oscillated between moments of chaos and governability
throughout history in the last 500 years according to Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J.
Silver [Caos e Governabilidade no moderno sistema mundial (Chaos and Governability
in the Modern World System). Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto; Editora UFRJ, 2001].
According to Arrighi and Silver, governability occurs when a country exercises a
hegemonic role in the world economy and is able to lead the other national states
through consensus. Chaos, however, results from the hegemonic crisis, where the
typical international anarchy gives rise to "an escalation of competition and conflicts
that goes beyond the regulatory capacity of existing structures", that is, the structures of
the current order are confronted by new challenging models.
According to Arrighi and Silver, since its inception in the late Middle Ages, the modern
world system witnessed the occurrence of three world hegemonies: the Dutch in the
seventeenth century, the British in the nineteenth century, and the American in the
twentieth century. The transitions from one hegemony to another were marked by the
increase of systemic chaos. The thesis presented in the book Chaos and Governability
in the modern world system is that since the 1970s we have experienced a new chaos,
marked by the crisis of US hegemony. The first feature of the current hegemonic crisis
concerns the so-called bifurcation of the reduction of military and financial capabilities.
In the two other transitions, from the Dutch to the British and from the British to the
American, the economic-financial decline of the hegemonic nation was accompanied by
military decadence. Today, the United States faces a gigantic economic and financial
crisis and, militarily, they weaken beyond confronting two opponents who increase their
power every day, Russia and China.
Vladimir Putin announced in 2012 that Russia would spend 580 billion euros on
weapons in the next ten years to modernize its army. It was from the year 2000 that
Russia decided to develop a strategic partnership with China. Russia considered that
China could help it in its resistance to the geopolitical ambitions of the United States in
both Eastern Europe and the Caucasus or Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) was established in 2001 to establish an alliance between Russia and
China in military and counterterrorism terms, religious fundamentalism and separatism
in the Asian region [MAZAT, Numa and SERRANO, Franklin. A Geopolítica das
Relações entre a Federação Russa e os EUA: da “Cooperação” ao Conflito (The
Geopolitics of Relations between the Russian Federation and the US: from
"Cooperation" to the Conflict). Available on the website
<http://www.revistaoikos.org/seer/index.php/oikos/article/view/293>].
China is building a large naval force to control the Pacific Ocean with the immediate
aim of curbing US military power in the western Pacific. The Chinese are building a
defensive force, which includes weapons that can hit US military targets. Chinese
military spending will surpass the combined budgets of the twelve other major powers
in the Asia-Pacific [WINES, Michael. EUA e China procuram acordar estratégia
militar (US and China seek to agree on military strategy). Available on website
<http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/944409-eua-e-china-procuram-acordar-

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estrategia-militar.shtml>. According to The Economist magazine, China will exceed US
military spending by 2025 [ALVES, José Eustáquio Diniz. EUA, China e Índia: disputa
de hegemonia e destruição do meio ambiente (USA, China and India: dispute over
hegemony and destruction of the environment). Available on website
http://www.ecodebate.com.br/2012/01/13/eua-china-e-india-disputa-de-hegemonia-e-
destruicao-do-meio-ambiente-artigo-de-jose-eustaquio-diniz-alves/].
Just as the two world wars ended with the status of Britain as the largest creditor nation
and made it into an indebted nation, the Cold War brought the end of the Soviet Union,
but transformed the United States into the largest debtor nation on the globe. The
declining hegemonic center (United States) is in a position to meet the military
challenge of the contemporary era and not have the financial means to solve system-
level problems that require systemic solutions. It is important to note that China is the
main creditor of the United States because it purchases a large part of the United States
debt securities and that it depends on the US market and investments.
The second point that evidences American hegemonic decadence is the globalization of
the economy, which, in Arrighi and Silver's view, undermines the power of national
states and weakens the regulatory capacity of large nations even within their own
economies. The process is similar to that of Dutch trading and shipping companies,
which, while giving 17th-century Holland the power to operate globally, also depleted
its functions and power. US multinational corporations, while appropriating part of the
income of the countries where they settle, have not provided an equivalent increase in
the income of US residents or their government. On the contrary, at the smallest sign of
economic and financial instability in the head office or the national economy, these
capitals flee to foreign markets, such as China, India and Mexico, and serve only to
accentuate the economic crisis in the United States. Donald Trump has stepped forward
as a candidate for President of the United States to reverse this situation.
With the end of economic and financial centralization around the hegemonic nation, the
United States, its regulatory capacity was weakened and made room for a new form of
systemic reorganization. This is reflected in the lack of global governance today. It is
worth noting that the United States has consolidated itself as a hegemonic nation in
solving the systemic problems that plagued the world between the two world wars. This
global governance does not exist anymore. Systemic-level problems in the
contemporary era cannot be solved either by the United States or by any other country
in the world resulting in the current systemic chaos. From the standpoint of the
hegemonic concept of the Italian philosopher, Gramsci, the lack of global governance is
central to the evidence of hegemonic decadence.
According to Gramsci, "to have hegemony is to ensure the intellectual and moral
direction of the political-social process or to establish the supremacy of a form of unity
of thought and life that is expressed in a conception of the world" [GRUPPI, L. O
conceito de hegemonia em Gramsci (The concept of hegemony in Gramsci). Rio de
Janeiro: Graal, 1978]. In this sense, the goal of international hegemonic action is to
make other countries accept the will of the hegemonic power as their own, through the
internalization of values that become consensual. When the hegemonic state ceases to
make its interest appear to interest everyone, for Gramsci it loses its condition and tends
to proceed to a process of domination with the use of military power. This is the

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situation in the United States in promoting military aggression against Yugoslavia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
Arrighi and Silver defend the thesis that after the current hegemonic rupture the center
of world power must concentrate in East Asia. The consolidation of the region as the
most dynamic center of large-scale capital accumulation processes has allowed the
emergence of a productive structure antagonistic to the North American one. This
combination of new structural features has transformed East Asia into both new
workshop how much in the safe of the world economy, under the leadership of a
business-like state (Japan) in the 1980s and a commercial diaspora (overseas Chinese),
which has turned China into the world's factory floor and tends to turn it into the world
economy's safe. Arrighi and Silver believe that the key post in the East Asian
emergency is that it is not a rampant process of gaining power due to the inauguration
of a new productive system or global governance that accounts for the ongoing systemic
reorganization, but only as a result of the bankruptcy of the United States as a
hegemonic power.
The international system is crumbling not because new powers are expanding their
domains, but because the United States is shrinking its domination. This tends to turn
the downward hegemony of the United States into an exploitative domination, which in
itself deprives the process of hegemonic domination. Arrighi and Silver find it difficult
to imagine a global leadership in the East Asian financial centers willing to tackle the
task of providing systemic solutions to the systemic problems left by American
hegemony, especially as the region also faces social contradictions that somehow add
up contradictions fueled by the United States. While stating that East Asia has yet to
sketch out any new path of development that points to an alternative to the dead end we
live in today, Arrighi seems convinced that the alternative will leave there. The bottom
line of the book is this: despite the new economic structure in the region, there is no
sign that East Asia has a global governance project that emerges as an alternative to the
existing systemic chaos. This means that the world will have to cope with a situation of
systemic chaos for a long time with a gigantic risk of the outbreak of local, regional and
even world wars.
All that has just been reported points to the need for humanity to constitute a world
government to meet its great challenges in the 21st Century, which consist of: 1)
Economic and financial chain crises; 2) Revolutions and social counterrevolution
around the globe; 3) Cascade Wars; 4) World overpopulation; 5) Deadly pandemic; 6)
Extreme climate changes; 7) Organized crime; and, 8) Threats from space, whose global
actions to neutralize them are impossible to be carried out by national states alone and
by current international institutions. The risk that this world government could be led by
the same great military and economic powers is real. It is preferable, however, to take
this risk than to do nothing. We must take this risk by working and betting on the
possibility that a truly democratic government can be constituted on a global scale in the
future.
The European Union is a source of institutional innovation that can provide answers to
the formation of a world government. The European Union has implemented what is
known as the "Network State" by integrating government actions at European, national,
regional and local levels. European integration is at the same time a reaction to the
process of globalization and its more advanced expression. The Single European Act of

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1987 set out the steps towards a truly unified market in 1992. In deciding to set up the
Euro and the European Monetary Institute, as well as harmonizing fiscal policies, the
Maastricht Treaty made an irreversible commitment for the total unification of the
European economy.
The European Union is essentially organized as a network that involves more
concentration and sharing of sovereignty than the transfer of sovereignty to a higher
level. European unification has generated resistance because the acceleration of the
integration process coincided with the stagnation of the living standards of the
population, with the emergence of unemployment and with the greatest social inequality
in the 1990s. Moreover, European integration happened without the European
Parliament to develop the capacity to obtain the consent of the populations of the
member states of the European Union and to obtain democratic legitimacy. Most likely,
the economic, political and social problems will be adequately addressed and resolved
by the improvement of the European institutions. It can be said that the European Union
is an embryo of a future world government.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 78, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in
Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and
consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy
systems, is the author of 13 books addressing issues such as Globalization and Development, Brazilian
Economy, Global Warming and Climate Change, The Factors that Condition Economic and Social
Development, Energy in the world and The Great Scientific, Economic, and Social Revolutions that
Changed the World.