Mark Mazower

"A history of the project of world government, from the first post-Napoleonic visions of the brotherhood of man to the current crisis of global finance"--

The History of an Idea

Governing the World

Gavin

Casually brilliant and oddly fond history of the UN et al. 

Practical cosmopolitanism - the promotion of any supranational structure at all - was for a long long time a view held only by strange people indeed - visionaries and ranters and scifi writers - until it was suddenly in the works, laboured over by full secretariats with big bucks. 

Mazower puzzles over why the US and Britain put so much into these structures, when the previous world order suited them fine. Answer? "Camouflage."

Governing the World The History of an Idea

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