By Franz Schurmann

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Anything that looks, acts or thinks like world government will find its seams coming apart.

What's the problem?

Just about all of us, including most of the poor and remote, live in a world that is somewhat like a finely tuned watch. We all know what happened when the rudder jammed on Alaska Airlines flight #26l. We want order not chaos.

But if order is the rigidity of a frozen crystal then that's slavery of the worst kind. And of course we don't want to live in any super-high temperature state where all atoms are free but life is impossible. The only condition that sustains life is that of liquid water. A liquid is a mix of freedom and control.

A finely tuned watch is the product of extreme control. But that's not the way successful social systems work. The reason America worked and the Soviet Union did not is that America keeps on finding ways to meld control and freedom. The Soviet Union only practiced control.

But we Americans better not boast. The recent air crashes raise the question whether a world in the end can work if it is a finely tuned watch. This is a big question. The following is a small prediction within a big question: world government is coming apart at the seams.

• Basis for the Prediction:
  

  It's pretty clear that despite all the turbulence in the world a lot of order prevails. Take oil for example. Oil is the lifeblood of the global economy and sometimes prices get too high or too low. Nevertheless oil prices are under control. If they weren't global inflation would spiral upwards out of control.

  It's not difficult to pinpoint those who have achieved control of the oil industry and explain the order they have achieved. First the order. We all live in a single highly integrated global economy. The information revolution that speeds up every day made this integration possible.

  The controllers consist of a select number of governments and corporations that work together to keep the system going. As with any cartel they know that either they swim together or they sink together.

  The governments are easy to pinpoint. The most important is America and its faithful partner Britain. Then come the key oil producers, especially Saudi Arabia. Then comes Iran which now works together closely with its one-time Saudi archenemy. Mexico and Venezuela are part of this super OPEC. So is Norway which gets a big share of North Sea oil. It was a recent visit by the Norwegian oil minister to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that allowed the influential Arabic language newspaper As-Sharq Al-Ausat to proclaim that stability is returning to world oil markets. (That's probably why the stock markets didn't get too upset over Fed chairman Greenspan's interest hikes).

  The oil companies are also easy to pinpoint. They still are mainly the same Anglo-American-Dutch "Seven Sisters" who have dominated world oil markets since early in the last century. They work together easily with the key governments ----- easily because they have been doing it for almost a century.

  A lot of people, especially on the left and the right, think these corporate-government linkages rule all of us in our one world. This is the true world government, they believe. Thoughts of this sort surfaced when the 21st Davos conference again met in the Swiss ski resort. Leaders, politicians and economists from all over the world came to Davos. President Clinton attended.

  The Davos conferences have plenty of enemies. On both left and right they are seen as conspiracy masquerading as conference. The left sees the participants as the stooges of global corporations, the "executive committee of the ruling class" in Karl Marx's words. The right sees them as "illuminati," the best and the brightest forming an inner circle whose grand design is to control the entire world.

  The word illuminati was coined some 200 years ago by John T. Robison, a scientist and Scottish Rite Free Mason. In 1797 he published a book entitled "Proofs of a Conspiracy" in which he related, when in Europe on sabbatical leave, he was asked to join a secret circle to promote illuminism. Illuminism was a strategy to set up a world government.

  So when groups like the Davos conference show up the left sees them as a sort of world government serving the giant corporations. The right agrees on the world government angle but prefers to see its members as evil conspirators, illuminati.

  On February 1 the As-Sharq al-Ausat asked editorially whether Davos was a social club or global government. It decided, from an Arab perspective, it was more club than government. An article the next day asked whether Davos was some new globalism or a social conscience. The author decided it was a bit of both. But then he stressed its "unfulfilled aspirations, horizons filled with dangers and its uncertain future."

  My view is that the Arab newspaper is closer to the reality than either the left or the right. The paper is right that Davos is more social club than government. And that is why it works. In a social club important information is exchanged. In government bureaucracy and hierarchy block information.

  The paper is also right that Davos both serves globalization and at the same time airs the grievances of those who suffer from it. The founder, a German economist named Klaus Schwab, keeps on stressing the terrible things going on. He sees rampant poverty and at the same time predicts a huge capital shortage for this year. Both globalism and the poverty it ignores are important items of information for the Davos elites. And the Arab paper is right in implying that the Davos conferences may now be entering their sunset phase.

  In recent years putative world governments have not fared well. In the 1980's it seemed the G-7 had become a kind of supreme council guiding the world economy. G-7 made the headlines while Davos was a side-show. G-7's guiding ideologues were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Free market capitalism was spreading everywhere. And as its influence increased its concerns spread beyond economics. The G-7 made environmental quality a key part of their guidance.

  But the G-7 is now coming apart at the seams. In their recent Tokyo meeting they thought China would be eager to accept induction into their inner circle. Instead Beijing said "thank you but no." And powerful Japan is getting upset over the fact it is the only non-white member and from a region that carries much greater weight in the world economy than Europe.

  In fact the declining importance of Europe in the global economy may be the real reason both G-7 and Davos are entering their sunset years. But there are other reasons for their decline. The continental Europeans, especially the French and Germans, have structuralist mind-sets. These two countries pushed and pushed for a structured European Union. They have it but what good is it doing them?

  When it comes to structure few organizations can beat the UN. Right from the beginning it was highly bureaucratized. The reason was that this was the only way to govern through so many different cultures and races. The UN did not do well during the Cold War. In fact its greatest contribution was non-structural. It provided an arena where enemies could exchange information with each other.

  When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 the UN's role suddenly became more significant. For a while it seemed this top-heavy organization could play a key role in many of the world's trouble spots But by the time of the Bosnia and Kosovo wars it became clear the UN only moved when led. And the leader turned out inevitably to be Uncle Sam.

  Last November the WTO had started to emerge as a successor to the declining G-7. But the real reason the "Millennium Round" wasn't adopted in Seattle was not the demonstrations but fierce European opposition to US-style free trade. There will be a WTO with both China and Taiwan as members. But it won't have anywhere near the power the Clinton administration wanted to assign it.

  For years political and cultural observer Walter Truett Anderson has argued for globalism but with governance, not government. Government assumes a structure through which governing occurs. Governance governs and seems to do it best without much of a structure. He has written how corporate structures are flattening out. Even as corporate mergers produce financial behemoths the corporate workplaces are getting smaller and flatter.

  Just from a humanistic perspective we should be glad that the global oil system does operate like a finely tuned watch. Even in the remotest part of the world you'll find people riding cars and planes whose ponderomotive force is oil.

  Much if not most of the control in the oil industry is done through networking. There are no huge bureaucratic structures. The actors are truly global. So far the result has been order and not chaos. Isn't that remarkable given the enormity of oil's domain?

  If that can be called governance then it's something to build on and not just to scold. Unless there is some sudden change I don't see the oil industry moving into its sunset phase. On the other hand I see Davos, the UN and G-7 heading into the sunset. On the other hand WTO could become something different as the high-energy Asian nations play a big part. And that will reduce the high entropy level of so many of the wannabe world governments.

  Contrary to the laws of Newtonian phsyics entropy can turn into order. And if that order leads to governance that could be a good thing for humans. (It might even help work out problems like the one fatally encountered by Flight 261).