Personally, I don't want to ever have a one-world government. For one, it means having to deal with people with a totally different mindset culturally.
So... diversity is bad and cultural hegemony is good?
And, for another, such aspirations are socialistic.
Not intrinsically, although many socialists do aspire to an international socialist movement because they believe that democratic socialism in one country would inevitably be subverted by foreign capitalists.
But there's noting inherently socialistic about the idea of a world government per se. A world government could easily be capitalistic. In fact, we are today, in the form of phenomena like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, seeing the emergence of a transnational legal regime that is designed to subvert national sovereignty and to prop up corporate power and influence over national governments.
Also -- democratic socialistic movements are a good thing. Saying that the wealth workers' labor creates should go to the owners of capital means you favor redistributing wealth from the bottom to the top.
Sorry. I believe in competition between nations, and I certainly believe in the idea of a sovereignty. 'Murica. ;-)
I would certainly agree that humanity is nowhere near where we would need to be for me to agree to a United Earth government.
But the cost of what you are describing is that the specter of war will never leave this world. The only way to end war is for your neighbors not to be foreign to you.
After all, the last thing anyone wants is weaponized space.
An exceedingly optimistic assessment, I think.
In the past I would have agreed, but the recent events have made me a little more wary. Now I think you'd need a good deal of protections, checks, and balances to prevent such a superstate from being largely run by bureaucrats, where the citizens get a symbolic "voice" that's then ignored.
You mean like with the European Union and Greece?
Needless to say, a worldwide goverment would only be good if it were actually democratic. Right now I would agree that national rule is better than and the only currently feasible form of resistance against the only form of worldwide governance we have: antidemocratic corporate behind the scenes (with things like the secret pseudo trade agreements it becomes more overtly antidemocratic) rule.
One key feature of United Earth seems to be he lack of pressure to make economic gains via agression. In a world where basic resources are not scarce (obviously stuff like starships still are) and people do not strive to be super-rich and are content with a normal lifestyle it is easier to have democratic rule than in a world where everybody yearns to get more at the costs of somebody else.
This.
Star Trek's anticapitalist subtext is very important to understanding the political culture it posits.
Needless to say, a worldwide goverment would only be good if it were actually democratic.
That in of itself is no promise of "good."
True -- democracy is not per se a sufficient condition for good government.
It is, however, a
necessary condition for good government.
Just as it is not a sufficient condition to be in the Republic of Chile to say that you are in Santiago, yet it is a necessary condition to be in the Republic of Chile to say you are in Santiago.
Democracy (looking around the world) comes in many different forms and flavors. Simply having a world government that bear the general description of "democratic" isn't enough to classify it a good government. Because it is possible to have a bad democracy.
Sure. Probably a better term for what
horatio83 is describing would be "constitutional liberal democracy." "Constitutional" because it functions according to a set of fundamental laws agreed upon by society and does not simply make its functions up as it goes along; "liberal" in the classical sense, as acknowledging the fact that certain inalienable rights are held by the people and by all individuals, and that the government may not violate these rights; and "democratic," meaning, it obtains a temporary renewable mandate to govern from the people as a whole.
I believe in competition between nations
There's another word for that. It's called 'war.'
Mr. Laser Beam for the win!
Needless to say, a worldwide goverment would only be good if it were actually democratic.
It would never endure. It would erode.
Keeping power decentralized is the better course for the sake of individual freedom. The power should be, as much as possible, with the individual.
The problem is, sometimes decentralized power is in fact far more oppressive than centralized power.
For instance, here in the United States, the state governments of the Deep South, Greater Appalachian, and Tidewater regions used to be given a great deal of local power. And they used that power to plunder the wealth of their African American citizenry, to oppress them under an apartheid system called "Jim Crow." It took the imposition of centralized authority from the federal government to end this apartheid system.
While it is certainly true that the federal government would never have acted to end American apartheid had it not been for the mass movements led by people like Dr. King, the simple fact of the matter is that decentralized power led to local oppression. It was the presence of federal power, acting as a check against local tyranny, that ended Jim Crow.
And that's not even mentioning the need for federal intervention to end slavery one hundred years earlier.
Not to mention, cultivating, and maintain different cultures ensures different outlooks, and perspectives, which will ultimately accelerate progress.
I agree -- but I also think that different cultures can continue to flourish under common governance. The English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots are all still distinct cultures after many centuries of common rule from Westminster.
For example in TOS United Earth is personalized by crew members who come from all over the planet ...
The reference to "United Earth" in TOS was quite vague, Earth was just Earth.
Nope. The idea that Earth has united into a single polity was present from the very first regular TOS episode produced, "The Corbomite Maneuver." In it, the
Enterprise was introduced as a United Earth ship.
(Later, the writers invented the Federation, and treated the
Enterprise as a Federation starship rather than a United Earth ship. This would appear to be a very early retcon, before the word for such a thing existed -- much as we are supposed to assume that Batman has always been from Gotham City in spite of early issues of
Detective Comics referring to his city as New York, we are supposed to assume the
Enterprise has always been a Federation starship in spite of early episodes calling it a United Earth ship.)
Apparently the term United Earth isn't in common use in the 24th century, I don't immediately recall ever hearing it.
TNG, "Attached."
My personal take is that United Earth is basically a international management organization, it mediates between Humanities many (and still sovereign) nations, and acts as a central point of contact for interstellar relations.
This idea is flatly contradicted by the above-mentioned "Attached," in which it is explicitly established that the "old nation-states" joined the United Earth government. Not "international management organization" -- government.
Because it is possible to have a bad democracy.
If one uses the word democracy to categorize forms of government, yes, then there are ample of bad democracies.
But this is a fairly limited view. If one doesn't just look at form but also at content you gotta use democracy like a word like justice, i.e. as an ideal to constantly strive for or, more technically, not as a binary 'either democracy or autocracy' but rather as continuous 'more or less democracy'. Then more democracy is clearly better than less. (Needless to say, the notion of democracy always implies the rule of law; mob rule is not democratic.)
Unless you are a right-winger, then of course democracy is something you strive to reduce which is what has happened ever since the reactionary Thatcher/Reagan revolutions that undid the social democratic post WWII (or in America post New Deal) regimes and put us (i.e. the West) on a path towards corporate socialism which is a form of autocratic or oligarchical rule under the guise of formal democracy.
There are tonnes of ways in which left wing governments tend to be anti democratic/authoritarian.
There have been nominally left-wing governments that were authoritarian, yes.
Of course, the entire intellectual premise of leftism is egalitarianism and the equality of all people -- which means that it is inherently in conflict with authoritarianism, and that any authoritarian government is precluded from genuine leftism by virtue of its behavior.
This is in contradiction to the right-wing tradition, which prizes hierarchy and is therefore not inherently in contradiction with authoritarianism. (Mainstream varieties of right-wing tradition are in conflict with authoritarianism only because they represent a fusion of feudalist hierarchical thinking and classical liberal concepts -- classical liberalism, of course, being to the left of the feudalism it grew out of; but rightism grew out of feudalist hierarchical structures, and so carries the potential for tyranny in its DNA.)
The reality is democratic means are very useless for addressing alot of issues.
The most obvious is that they offer nothing for the minority who has limited power to vote.
Quite true, as demonstrated by the recent struggle of LGBT Americans to obtain the right to marry in all 50 states, even when a majority of the population has attempted to violate this natural right by denying them such legal protection. This is why democracy is combined with a regime that enumerates specific rights for individuals and minority groups that may not be invalidated by popular vote. Hence, "constitutional liberal democracy" rather than just democracy.
STAR TREK's "universe" is, without a doubt, as much a part of its appeal as the characters that inhabit it. It's a very romantic idea, actually, of all Humanity living and working together for the betterment of everyone. But holding up that ideal to the real world doesn't negate the International cooperation that already exists. Things like trade and a global economy help ensure peace and the prosperity for most of us, for example.
While I agree that
Star Trek's fictional idealism does not negate real-life international cooperation, I feel it important to point out that the current system of globalism has in fact functioned to impoverish a great many millions, damaging local economies in developed nations, exploiting workers in developing nations, and enriching a small transnational elite at the expense of the great majority.
Like so many dreams, many of these ideas, like a no-money society and a one-world government collapse in the face of reality.
In fairness, the historical trend throughout the world for the past two thousand years has been for smaller units of sovereign governance to merge into fewer and larger units of governance -- hence the arrival of the nation-state, and now the gradual emergence of the transnational states and state-like entities. The potential for a one-world government -- be that in the form of a constitutional liberal democracy, and/or a democratic socialism, or in the form of some sort of corporatist tyranny -- could well be a historical process that is still under way, with those of us living through it no more able to yet perceive the end result than those who lived in the middle of feudalism able to perceive the emergence of democratic capitalism.
But having dreams like that are a nice yardstick to remind us that, we can still do a better job than we've done, up til now. And that's not a bad thing ... it certainly makes for great storytelling, something which STAR TREK has always been good at.
Progressive rule that empowers underpriviliged people has always been centralized. Example are the French Revolution or the US federal government enforcing civil rights for Blacks during the reconstruction era and then in the 60s..
Unfortunately, neither of those examples have anything to do with a central government affording people rights. Those are really prime examples of individuals making the choice to stand against the very governments that were being overbearing towards them in the first place. Persons, individuals, rallying around the ideas of personal liberty and acting in spite of what the establish authority has imposed.
I don't disagree with the importance of mass movements such as you describe here. But it is simply not accurate to claim that the abolition of Jim Crow would have come about without federal intervention. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are the hammers that struck it down.
Thousands respectively millions of dead Koreans, Vietnamese and Angolans beg to differ.
You misunderstood me. I made the specific distinction. The space race
specifically was a bloodless competition. To my knowledge, no Koreans, Vietnamese, or Angolans were killed as part of the
space race. The only people who died were the results of tragic accidents. Not for any other reason.
No, but you cannot separate the space race from the larger imperial struggle for geopolitical power in which the United States and Soviet Union were engaged. The Cold War was the crucible in which the space race was forged. And while it may have been a peaceful manifestation of that conflict of rival imperialisms, but the Cold War's various manifestations in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Afghanistan, etc., cannot be separated from the space race. You don't get the latter without the former.
