A proverb says that `Politics is the art of the possible.' This concept avoids being a tautology by causing people to focus on what they can do rather than on dreams of what they would like to see done.
Here are proposals that many will consider dreams of what I would like to see done. But I speak from experience when I propose the possible: two decades ago, I started work on a project to bring freedom to the software industry. While software freedom is still only partial, the notion is neither ignored nor a cause for amusement as it was at the beginning, but has taken root.
Since people and organizations make mistakes — it is human to err —, a political system must include an opposition that can become the government without a civil war. Otherwise the society will die.
This means that a country needs
A country may be a long time dying. The Roman Empire took centuries. Nonetheless, just as people need order and law for survival and security, they need justice to establish a meaningful society. In periods of rapid change, the nature of justice will change: for example, a thousand years ago, it was very expensive to reduplicate information. Now, it is very cheap to make copies.
A government can change the laws and provide more justice. But without the ability to change government peacefully, a backward government may stay in power and fail to change the law, or its expulsion may be accompanied by vast damage.
The only robust political system that enables change is democracy. But for democracy to succeed, losers must be willing to give up peacefully. Similarly, winners must not take excessive revenge on their defeated opponents. Otherwise, those who would lose will not give up. (Of course, democracy may not succeed — democracy is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.)
The United States Constitution shows us how to create a long lasting government. (In the two hundred years between 1790 and 1990, the US suffered only one civil war. In contrast, western Europe, which lacked a single government, suffered the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I and World War II.)
The prime rule is to presume that people will be evil. This is easy for Christians, since the religion presumes that `man is fallen', but others think of people as perfectible and so design systems that are less robust. The solution is to balance various powers among different people with different goals. Thus, in the United States, the President may issue a pardon, but he may only do so after a court as decided that the person to be pardoned has committed an offense; and the court may only make its decision according to the Constitution itself and on laws and treaties passed by the legislature.
Rather than base influence on the number of votes possessed by a country, or on a weak and single chamber parliament, the European Union should adopt this policy. (Its legislature should have two chambers, population-based chamber, like the current Parliament, and a taxes paid chamber.)
Regardless how successful a government is in providing justice, it has to raise revenue and it has to do well under modern economic conditions.
To raise revenue a government can only tax or borrow; it can do nothing else, except to cut spending — and there is a minimum it must spend.
Moreover, because many modern industrial processes have a high initial and low incremental cost, a government must regulate, even though people in governments tend often to act to promote their interests, or the interests of their associates, rather than the interests of their country. Without good regulation, a few companies will grow to dominate the country and its government.
Moreover, to prevent people from suffering poisoning and the other `bads' of economic `goods' production, a government needs to force external costs inwards. This means it needs to provide a market for pollutants.
For success, these solutions all require a (relatively speaking) reliable, quick, and honest legal system.
Everything I have just described can or could be implemented in current countries. But over the past few centuries, the cost of travel and communications has come down dramatically. Moreover, the `bads' of economic activity, such as air pollution, drift across borders. Trade increased in the 19th century, was cut back in the early parts of the 20th, and has been increased again.
In the latter half of the 20th century, we saw a huge growth in the governing institutions that decide disputes between organizations. However, none of these are democratic: they are institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, that are set up by diplomats to decide disputes that countries do not think important enough to fight over. (Middling important disputes are settled by economic sanctions and the like — what are called `trade wars'.)
In one sense, the process is similar to the development of courts for business: that is to say, the people in the more political part of government decided that they would put this problems onto a court system that they could ignore most of the time.
But in another sense, the process misses the key factor, which is legitimacy: people do not accept the institutions except as tools.
Wider governments are needed. As well as I can see, the only way to do this is to create new, meaningful supragovernments.
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