Elites have sacrificed their advantage grudgingly throughout history. The primary force which has driven this erosion is, as Weber noted a hundred years ago, the dependency of the extant elite on emerging new elites for their quality of life. The extent to which this is necessary rather than acceptable or ethically desirable will govern the degree to which world institutions come into being. Such institutions can consist of collaborations amongst peers for mutual advantage, which we discuss first, or they can be regulatory structures which a limited alliance tries to impose upon the rest. We discuss this second.
Collaborative institutions have, at their heart, the pursuit of mutual advantage.
The groups which are involved all stand to gain from the outcome and they are therefore prepared to sacrifice individual freedoms for this. The process by which this is achieve is not a straightforward one, as the history of the European Union may suggest. As a project in its own right, however, it has two fundamental aims. First, Europe has a bellicose history and has triggered a century of global conflict. Its peoples need to be tied with bonds of mutual advantage.