Temporal Arbitrage
The World Federalism movement came to be in the wake of World War II1. Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of Thomas Mann, helped draft a model world constitution at the University of Chicago in 19472. Her father, suspected by McCarthy of communist activity, had introduced Durant’s Declaration of Interdependence3 at the Hollywood Bowl in 1945. But their explicit goal — world government — proved all but politically impossible.
But the world federalists soon settled on a different vector of implementation — with Borgese co-founding the Club of Rome in 1968.
When you vote, you generally choose who governs for the next four or five years. You can vote to ‘throw the rascals out’4, reverse their policies, even change societal direction. This is the fundamental promise of democracy: power can always be contested, mandates must be renewed, governments should serve those governed.
But the climate targets your government committed to were set in 19925. So were the biodiversity frameworks shaping land use6. And the Sustainable Development Goals now embedded in housing and education policy were finalised in 20157, continuing frameworks established decades earlier. These commitments are now tightly integrated with trade agreements, development loans, carbon markets, and financial regulations across dozens of jurisdictions.
No single government can unpick them within an electoral term. By the time you notice their effects, the politicians who committed your future have long since retired, and their successors face a system so embedded that reversal is all but impossible.
This is temporal arbitrage: exploiting mismatched time horizons to place decisions beyond democratic reach.
The Functionalist Blueprint
The theoretical foundation originates back in 1916, when Leonard S. Woolf published International Government8 through the Fabian Society. Woolf realised that international organisations harbouring specialised technical knowledge could gradually accumulate authority through practical necessity.
Each problem solved at international level would create dependencies; each dependency would justify expanded scope; each expansion would entrench the organisation further. Sovereignty would migrate gradually from national parliaments to international organisations, driven not by constitutional transfer but by technical coordination.
This was the effective birth of what Mitrany would later title Functionalism9.
Alfred Zimmern — who helped found both Chatham House10 and the League of Nations11 — drew directly on Woolf’s framework. The League embodied the functionalist model: a General Assembly for deliberation, a Secretariat for administration, and specialised technical committees where long-term strategy would be determined. When the League eventually collapsed, the United Nations inherited this architecture largely intact.
Technical committees — staffed by experts circulating through elite networks — draft long-term strategies. Secretariats administer implementation across decades. General assemblies vote on adoption, providing democratic legitimation — yet this democratic claim is largely ceremonial. Once launched, the strategy slowly gains traction through ‘soft law’12 until it becomes practically irreversible.
Science as Authority
Functionalism requires a legitimating framework — something to justify why technical decisions should escape political deliberation. That framework emerged from a 1941 London conference titled ‘Science and World Order’.
The conference brought together leading British scientists including JD Bernal, JBS Haldane, John Boyd Orr, and Julian Huxley. Delegates openly called for ‘scientific government’ — governance structured according to scientific principles and directed by scientific expertise. Bernal presented a draft scheme for an International Resources Office to coordinate global resource management, a proposal that would eventually become reality through the International Union for Conservation of Nature, co-founded by Julian Huxley in 1948.
A follow-up correspondence event in 1942 produced Science and Ethics, arguing that science determines facts; ethics can be derived from facts; therefore scientific consensus generates moral imperatives. Haldane13 stated the principle directly: ‘Science is concerned with what a man must do, ethics with what he thinks he should do’.
If accepted, this principle transforms political disagreement into moral failure. Opposition to a scientifically-derived strategy becomes opposition to ethics itself. The strategy ceases to be a political choice subject to democratic revision and becomes a moral necessity. Contestation shifts from legitimate political debate to the illegitimate realm of denialism.
Selecting the Pathway
By the mid-1960s, the institutional architecture was largely in place. What remained was selecting a strategic focus that would exploit the temporal arbitrage mechanism.
The groundwork was laid in 1966, when Kenneth Boulding published ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’14, contrasting the ‘cowboy economy’ of limitless expansion with the ‘spaceman economy’ of a closed system requiring careful management. This reframed the planet as a vessel with limited carrying capacity, requiring coordinated stewardship — and, by implication, a crew and captain.
The year 1968 proved decisive. In April, the Club of Rome was founded, bringing together figures including Aurelio Peccei, Alexander King, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, and Erich Jantsch15 — industrialists, scientists, and systems theorists committed to addressing ‘the predicament of mankind’16 — interlocking global problems requiring coordinated response beyond national governments. The Club commissioned MIT to produce Limits to Growth17 (1972), providing a modelling infrastructure and public narrative for the environmental pathway.
That same year, UNESCO’s Biosphere Conference18 in Paris became the first intergovernmental conference to consider human alteration of the global environment. The conference framed the planet as a single system with a dominant human species being out of balance with his environment, leading to even outbreaks of zoonotic disease. The solution demands integrated management, and ‘biosphere reserves’ — territories under international scientific oversight.
Richard Falk — working with the World Order Models Project19 — published This Endangered Planet20 in 1971, identifying four potential pathways for restructuring world order. The fourth was environmentalism. Within twelve months, it was being operationalised.
Environmental problems possess characteristics uniquely suited to the functionalist-technocratic model: planetary scope justifying supranational jurisdiction; time horizons far exceeding democratic cycles; scientific framing enabling the ‘ethics from science’ mechanism; existential stakes delegitimising opposition; and connections to land use, energy, agriculture, and finance that compound over time.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages21 (1970) provided the complementary framework, arguing that ecology was replacing ideology as the organising principle of global politics. Three years later, Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission22 with David Rockefeller.
The Twenty-Year Rhythm
The years 1970–72 saw an extraordinary concentration of foundational activity. Brzezinski published his strategic framework. Falk identified the environmental pathway. The Club of Rome released Limits to Growth. The Stockholm Conference established the United Nations Environment Programme23. The US and Soviet Union signed their Agreement on Cooperation in Environmental Protection24. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis was founded to provide global ‘black box’ modelling capacity25. Within this brief window, every major element of contemporary environmental governance was either created or set in motion.
The Trilateral Commission followed in 1973, providing a forum where government, business, and civil society could coordinate strategy outside democratic structures. The New International Economic Order26 (1974) attached conditions to development aid requiring recipient nations to accept the emerging governance model. The IFDA’s ‘Third System’ framework (1978) formalised the public-private-civil society partnership model, with NGOs positioned to define the ‘common good’ guiding policy.
The Brundtland Commission’s 1987 report, Our Common Future27, marked the mid-cycle pivot, introducing ‘sustainable development’ as the organising concept for the next phase. That same year, Gorbachev signalled Soviet embrace of environmental cooperation — the East-West convergence on the ecological pathway anticipated by Brzezinski.
Twenty years after Stockholm, the Rio Earth Summit28 harvested the accumulated momentum, producing the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Agenda 21. The Global Environment Facility served both conventions, integrating environmental objectives with international finance; the foundational mechanism enabling carbon markets, blended finance, and debt-for-nature swaps, while Agenda 21 promoted the use of public private partnerships with NGO steering from developing nations to developed.
Twenty years after Rio, the cycle repeated: Rio+20 initiated the process leading to the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, which now frame policy across virtually every domain of governance.
The Lock-In Mechanism
The defeat of democratic contestation operates through reinforcing dynamics. Environmental commitments are embedded within trade agreements, development lending, and financial regulations, such that reversal requires simultaneous renegotiation across multiple domains. Experts circulate between academic positions, government advisory roles, NGO leadership, and international organisations, maintaining strategic consistency — regardless of which party holds office.
The ‘ethics derived from science’ framework delegitimises opposition as anti-scientific, constraining debate to implementation details. Financial instruments — carbon credits, natural capital accounting, green bonds — create stakeholder interests invested in perpetuating the framework.
The financialisation of environmental governance deserves particular attention, because it represents the point at which lock-in becomes effectively permanent. Carbon markets, ESG ratings, and natural capital accounting have created an entire asset class whose valuations depend on the framework’s perpetuation.
BlackRock, State Street, and the major consulting firms now have fiduciary obligations tied to climate commitments; pension funds hold portfolios structured around thirty-year decarbonisation trajectories.
A government attempting reversal would face not only diplomatic isolation but active opposition from a financial sector whose balance sheets depend on the trajectory continuing.
The cybernetic principle POSIWID — the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does — provides the appropriate analytical frame. Whatever the stated intentions or idealistic language, the system’s purpose is revealed by its outcomes: placing long-horizon decisions beyond democratic reach, transforming political decision into technical necessity, creating irreversible commitments through mismatched time horizons.
The system also selects for particular framings. Short-term, locally manageable issues don’t require supranational architecture — only problems characterised as long-term, global, and existential justify the functionalist model. The system therefore has structural incentives to emphasise planetary boundaries, tipping points, and civilisational risk.
These may or may not be accurate, but their utility for legitimating the architecture is very real — and independent of their accuracy.
The Defence
One might be tempted to reject the framing entirely, arguing that temporal arbitrage is a necessity — that electoral volatility is incompatible with managing systems operating on decadal and centennial timescales.
Democratic elections run on four-year cycles, while the environment operates on decades and centuries. A four-year control system cannot manage a hundred-year process; it lacks what Ross Ashby called ’requisite variety’. The twenty-year cycle functions as a low-pass filter, dampening destructive oscillations to protect long-term strategic planning from shifting opinion.
Voters do tend to undervalue the future — a citizen in 2026 values cheaper petrol today far more than a potential event in 2046. If a bias toward present consumption over future survival exists in democratic societies, someone should act as a guardian for those not yet born, those who cannot vote.
And there is also the question of scale. Democracy is bounded by borders, but some problems are not — carbon does not respect geography, pandemics do not stop at passport control. Since no global parliament exists — and creating one is politically impossible — the functionalist bureaucracy becomes the only available interface between planetary reality and human governance.
That’s the argument. And it is one that deserves to be taken seriously, because it’s not obviously wrong.
The Rebuttal
The solutions offered generally rely on technical committees correctly identifying problems, accurately modelling trajectories, and designing effective interventions. But the historical track record tells a very different story. The same networks repeatedly produce confident predictions of imminent disaster that later prove spectacularly wrong, population projections that miss demographic transitions, and economic models that fail to factor in the consequences of their own recommendations.
Predictions are presented not as hypotheses but as ‘settled science’ demanding immediate action, and when they fail, the response is quiet memory-holing and pivoting to the next crisis. The system does not deal with errors that materialise on a twenty-year timescales — it simply ignores them.
The people presented as guardians of the future are meant to be impartial stewards of humanity’s long-term welfare. But the people on technical committees, moving through NGOs and international secretariats, and shaping the ‘scientific consensus’ that becomes moral imperative have interests and career incentives like anyone else.
The same apparatus that defines the problem also claims the authority to solve it. So what is dismissed as ‘noise’ may be legitimate dissent, and what is treated as ‘signal’ may be institutional self-interest dressed up as necessity.
There’s another problem. Centralised systems fail differently from distributed ones: democracy can cause costly policy swings, but technocratic systems tend to spread one bad call everywhere. If a strategy is wrong and can’t be reversed, the damage compounds for decades. The same defences against short-term volatility create a vulnerability to long-term misjudgment.
The most troubling assumption is that democracy is now a liability. Carried to its logical conclusion, the defence implies that the consent of the governed is incompatible with civilisational survival. Once that door is open, any issue considered ‘long-term’ or ‘existential’ becomes a reason to suspend democratic accountability. And because the labelling is done by the same technocratic guardians, the exception can expand indefinitely — without a clear stopping point.
Ask yourself: who picks what gets shielded from public scrutiny?
And what’s the recourse when those guardians lead us squarely into disaster?
The Foreclosure of Contestation
It’s no coincidence that Elisabeth Mann Borgese turned to world federalism the moment the UN was born. Or that Richard Falk saw environmentalism as the perfect catalyst for change. The Trilateral Commission’s timing and the twenty-year cycle from Stockholm to Rio to the SDGs all follow the same pattern. These were carefully planned steps, part of a strategy that began with Woolf’s Fabian functionalism. This approach was put into practice through the UN system, and it justifies itself by using scientific consensus to define moral duty.
There’s a huge amount of documentation, and most of it is public. But arguing against it is hard. The game is rigged: if you criticize environmental strategy, you’re denying science. Oppose global coordination, and you’re retreating into nationalism. Question governance by experts, and you’re just an ignorant populist. The terms are set so that fundamental disagreement looks wrong, unethical, and illegitimate.
A real fight would mean challenging the core idea — that ethics born from scientific consensus have the authority to overrule democratic sovereignty. But that position has already been boxed in. Take it, and you’re framed as someone who doesn’t grasp the scale of the planetary problem, who shirks duty to our grandchildren, who refuses to accept plain facts, who seeks ‘to kill granny’.
Temporal arbitrage works because it plays the long game within our short-term democracy. By the time the consequences are clear, it’s difficult to change direction. Politicians who try to fight it end up swinging at shadows — the real choices were locked in decades ago, by people who are long gone, in meetings nobody remembers.
The playbook isn’t a secret; it’s been developed and documented for over a hundred years. And its core feature — moving key decisions out of democracy’s reach — works exactly as intended.
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“Thers is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death”
-Proverbs 14:12