Abstrakt
This article asks how the United Nations (UN) tries to overcome the modern state system and focuses on the most important UN efforts which could potentially situate it as a form of world government. This study's title - which may be read in two contrasting ways - illustrates a certain ambiguity in the UN's efforts.
The first reading implies the overriding and exceeding of the modern state system in order to reach a new political order while the other holds that the new political system to be achieved through UN activities is faraway and that the UN and the new order are separated on different sides of some barrier. By ex-amining the significance of the Euclidean concept of lines in modern Western thinking and reviewing the most common arguments for the world state, it is shown that the UN ultimately operates within a framework of Western modernity and is unable to transcend this limitation.
The UN's aspirational move to exceed the modern state system always returns to the categories and ways of thinking which were established alongside that very system.