Must a world government violate the right to exit?

Abstract

This paper offers a response to the common claim that a world government is undesirable because one would not be able to leave its territory. This claim nearly always appears as an adjunct to the possibility that a world government would be irredeemably bad. I separate out two implications of the impossibility of exit: first, that a world government is unable to respect human rights; and second, that regardless of its status as rights-respecting, it is, all things considered, better to be able to leave a territory if one wishes to do so. As a response, I develop a concept of exit rights. This shows that respect for exit rights is notnecessarily undermined by the presence of a world government, and that a world government is able to provide for the substance of the right or the interests that it secures. Next, I argue that the normative force of the claim that one ought to be able to exit the territory of a bad government lies in a false asymmetry between territorial states in the states system and a world government. For individuals who live under an illegitimate government, it makes practically no difference whether there exists some other legitimate government if they are unable to move to or live in its territory – the situation of the vast majority of individuals already living under ‘very bad’ regimes. I conclude that an illegitimate world government is not worse than an illegitimate territorial state with regards to the ability to exit