The push toward global government seems to be gathered momentum on a number of fronts and is being advanced through trade organizations, the UN, and dozens of other avenues. Critics have also appeared from every side, charging everything from a business conspiracy to a liberal plot, and according to PNS commentator Walter Truett Anderson they may all be right -- but the process of world government is well underway. Anderson, author of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman), is a political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.

Leftish critics of the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and other pieces of the ever-growing mosaic of international free-trade arrangements claim that business interests are writing a "global constitution" that will set the economic ground rules for the rest of us.

Right-wingers are equally sure a cabal of human-rights activists, environmentalists, women's groups and other Western do-gooders are trying to turn the United Nations into a super-government that will enforce their nefarious liberal agendas as global policy.

Both sides are right -- sort of.

They're right in seeing that more and more causes are going global. Instead of (or, more often, in addition to) taking their case to City Hall or Washington D. C., activists and interest groups of all persuasions are inclined to take it to the U. N., the World Bank, the World Trade Organization -- or to the courts of global public opinion. Even the U.S. labor movement, which was beginning to look like the last bastion of isolationism, seems to be recognizing that globalization of the economy is irreversible -- and that means they will have to expend more energy on considering the conditions of workers everywhere instead of focusing entirely on lost jobs at home.

The critics are also right in recognizing that something roughly like a global system of governance -- underpinned by a global political culture -- is slowly taking form. This is a huge, many-sided monster, made up of all kinds of regimes, customs, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, networks and agreements -- indeed, some theorists argue that it scarcely qualifies as a system at all.

But does it have a global constitution? Not if you mean a written constitution, drawn up in some global Philadelphia by a gathering of international dignitaries, ratified by the citizens of the world to serve as the framework for a true world government. It's true that some people in the World Federalists and other organizations think we need some such document, or the human race will never get its act together. But that is a lost cause -- it's nowhere near happening now, nor is it at all likely to happen in the future.

The emerging global constitution is not a written document, nor the product of any master plan -- no conspiracy of right, left, or center -- but rather the result of a lot of separate arrangements hammered together for a whole range of reasons. It's made up out of history and experience, more on the British model than the American.

It is the product of all kinds of forces that push people toward forming arrangements of governance. Some theoreticians say that politics requires two ingredients -- connections and difference. If people live together in a tightly-connected community and have no serious difference, they don't need a government, and societies that have no contact don't need any common governing institutions, no matter how serious their dissimilarities might be.

In this light, it could be argued that we are getting more global politics now, creating more new governing arrangements, because the world is a lot more hooked up than it used to be -- and is getting more hooked up all the time. The spread of communications systems is obviously a big part of what's happening, but there are also more interconnections because more people are in motion, permanently and temporarily, and more stuff is in motion as international commerce turns the world into one big bazaar.

Climate change -- slowly, ominously, inexorably stealing toward the top of the list of global concerns -- is another kind of connection. It reminds us vividly that we are all on the same planet, and gives us something else to argue about.

Put these and other pieces together, and you have what might be called a constitutionalizing process. It's rowdy and messy, but it is creating a truly global civilization -- one that, if not exactly orderly isn't outright anarchy either. The process is probably going to continue for a long time, and as it does you can expect a lot of jockeying for advantage, and a lot of people worrying that some group, other than their own, is shaping the system to its own design.