— 455 —
  ed must be set against the increases in real wealth that globalization of economies undeniably creates (12). There is no need, however, to live with the social and human problems which globalization generates. One way of dealing with the negative second-order consequences of economic globalization is to globalize political life — to construct world parliamentary (or congressional) institutions (13). These must be designed in such a way as to be able to generate wicksellian connections. They therefore must be democratic and, for obvious reasons, they must also be federal. I will be brief about what I mean by democracy, having devoted much space to the subject in my Competitive Governments. Democracy calls for popular elections. For a world parliament, that means first that representatives must be elected by the people of the world. It is difficult, of course, to imagine that dictatorships such as China and Cuba would allow elections of representatives to a world body when elections are not permitted on their home turfs. That is one of the reasons why the creation of a world parliamentary system will emerge slowly, assuming that one day there is a will to create one. The second requirement of a democratic order — as important as the first -— is the construction in the world body of a set of checks and balances. In practice, that may be a difficult task to carry out, but from a conceptual point of view, the matter poses no challenge (14).
      The new world parliamentary body would be a jurisdictional tier of a federal structure. We know from the 1787 debates in Philadelphia and the events which preceded and informed these debates, that to be a genuine federal jurisdictional level of government, it is essential that the government or governments of that tier have an autonomous entrenched power to tax. The world parliamentary system must therefore have the capacity and ability to collect some or all of its revenues. Otherwise the world body would be confederal, not fed- 12 13 14
       (12)       Throughout, I have been concerned exclusively with the globalization of economic life. Associated with that globalization, we are also witnesses to a globalization of culture. To the extent that this last globalization is consequent on that of the economy and to the extent that the globalization of culture is in effect the spread of a mass culture that corrodes « higher » culture, one would have to subtract something from the wealth created by economic globalization.
      (13)        The conventional expression is « world government ». The term has a long and convoluted history and has been associated with all sorts of constructions. For this reason I have decided to make use of the expression in the text.
      (14)        The difficulty is apparent in the fact that many countries that have periodic popular elections do not have governments that possess internal checks and balances.