When we try to obtain guidance from the past as to potential forms that a unification of humanity into a world-government could take, we find several models that have been tried, to greater or less success, at the nation level of organisation. There is the parliamentary model, to some degree the basis for the General Assembly of the United Nations, or there might be a federal approach, whereby there are quasi-independent states welded together under a federal umbrella. Both of these models are familiar to us, but they each have certain limitations and disadvantages for the vision presented by Sri Aurobindo.
“The idea of a world-parliament is attractive at first sight, because the parliamentary form is that to which our minds are accustomed; but an assembly of the present unitarian national type could not be the proper instrument of a free world-union of this large and complex kind; it could only be the instrument of a unitarian World-State. The idea of a world-federation, if by that be understood the Germanic or American form, would be equally inappropriate to the greater diversity and freedom of national development which this type of world-union would hold as one of its cardinal principles. Rather some kind of confederation of the peoples for common human ends, for the removal of all causes of strife and difference, for interrelation and the regulation of mutual aid and interchange, yet leaving to each unit a full internal freedom and power of self-determination, would be the right principle of this unity.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity, Part Two, Chapter 31, The Conditions of a Free World-Union, pp. 275-276
Sri Aurobindo Studies 