Fortunately, the final presentation of this conference was made by John Kenneth Galbraith, who alone among the parade of participants focused on the direction that the U.N. must take to remain relevant. Galbraith's major thesis was that in the long run it will be underlying independently controlling trends more than individual political action that will determine this path. The problem he points out is that our institutional structure in international relations is now out of step with the new reality. "The United Nations. . . is risking obsolescence. . . . Significantly it remains in both structure and competence in the age of the dominant nation-state. . . . The U.N. agencies have discussions but alas not power. This we must now correct. The U.N. role must now be open to . . . major change. The day will come, I believe, for a legislative oversight of the world economic and social system, the first step toward WORLD GOVERNMENT."
To world governmentalists, this is an expression of just plain common sense. However, what makes these statements worthy of note is the refreshingly straightforward expression of the problem in the context of inevitable world government as the essential ultimate goal. Sadly, the open statement of these facts is becoming rarer and rarer in public discourse among people with influence who are basically internationalists. So craven have most public figures become in their expression of internationalism that whereas a decade ago the tendency to avoid the term "world government" was becoming more and more prevalent, the latest trend has gone beyond that to the more frequent unsolicited volunteering of the fact that world government is not viable and they are against it.
This tendency was first observed in the change of rhetoric by Jonathan Schell who in his landmark work The Fate of the Earth, while not mentioning world government, explicitly pinpointed national sovereignty as the villain of the world dilemma. Three years later in his follow-up work The Abolition, he mentioned "world government" more than 50 times only to assure his readers that he does not favor it and that national sovereignty is not all that bad.
Similarly that eminent cybernetician Stafford Beer went the same route, trading in explicit and clear support for world government for the muddled and confusing concept of global governance.
On another level nongovernmentalists clearly thought internationalists such as Vice President Gore, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in respect to their perception of a hostile anti-world government climate among conservative U.S. political figures, have all volunteered without solicitation their displeasure with the concept of world government.
In this climate, Galbraith's almost unique readiness to express what is required in the international arena other than what is palatable to the Neanderthals of the nineties deserves special note.