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And precisely because the world's political problems must be solved by legislation if they are not to be solved by force, a world cop attached to a world court, standing alone, could never serve to keep the peace of the world. To achieve this end, the world cop would have to be backed by a full-fledged world government—by a legislature to translate political decisions into written laws and an executive to give such laws substance in action.
John Citizen may not have contemplated any such far-flung scheme when he upped with a Yes to the notion of an international police force, providing a pat example of one of the dangers of polls: an opinion offered on an isolated proposal without taking account of its implications. Yet the whole idea of establishing such a force inexorably raises all the problems connected with the creation of a complete world government.
Since a mere world court would not be enough, what sorts of world government are left, from which a world police force might take its orders?
Experts in the field use two confusingly like-sounding names to describe the two very different kinds of organization that can be established by a group of states or nations. One is a "federation"—a real union like the United States today. The other and far looser kind of group government is called a "confederation."
State Made of States. In a confederation, states are represented as states, rather than citizens as citizens. So in a confederation the real sovereignty, the ultimate power, remains in the national governments, which give up little or none of their own sovereignty in the process of uniting. A confederation never acts directly on the people; it cannot tax them or jail them or regulate them or protect them, it cannot give them citizenship or passports, except through the medium of their own national government.
This country was a confederation—and as such was fast falling apart—during the few years that intervened between the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. The League of Nations was a confederation. And despite the name, Culbertson's World Federation Plan is another.
Relative influence is one of the biggest bugs that would beset both the construction and the smooth operation of a confederated world government. Since confederated governments are made up of nations, not of people, small nations are always demanding equality with large ones—just as the poor man has a vote equal to the rich man's in the U.S. Government.
Yet regardless of voting rights as between nations, a world confederation would constantly be at the mercy of its strongest members. Such a government, if set up after the war, would be completely dominated at the start by the U.S., Great Britain and Russia; it would collapse if they withdrew—as any one of them could and would if its own national interests should ever be seriously compromised or endangered by world government action.