The Administrative State in a Globalizing World: Some Trends and Challenges

For centuries, dreamers have looked forward to the day when people would overlook their differences and recognize all as brothers, that under their skin they were very much alike and aspired to much the same future. Then, they would see the advantages of cooperating together, burying their disagreements, and working toward common objectives. Barriers between people would be removed. People and goods would move freely across the globe. Every human being would be accorded the same rights and be treated with the same consideration. And people would lay down their arms and make peace, not war. The world would unite and all human beings would realize that they shared a common fate. In time, the advancement of technology has indeed reduced distance and increased mobility, thereby bringing people closer and closer together and uniting the planet. But the experience of global warfare in increasingly horrifying form has made imperative an end to the madness of continued internecine conflict and a need to create universal bonds. Slowly, in fits and starts, the world's statesmen began to devise a new international order that would better suit humanity until in the last quarter of the 20th century, the world awoke to the fact that the future had at last arrived at thanks to globalization.