Terrorists, arms dealers, money launderers, drug dealers, traffickers in women and children, and the modern pirates of intellectual property all operate through global networks.² So, increasingly, do governments. Networks of government officials—police investigators, financial regulators, even judges and legislators—increasingly exchange information and coordinate activity to combat global crime and address common problems on a global scale. These government networks are a key feature of world order in the twenty-first century, but they are underappreciated, undersupported, and underused to address the central problems of global governance.

The best evidence of the disaggregated state may be found in the logs of embassies around the world. The records from U.S. embassies, at least, show a steady procession of regulators visiting their foreign counterparts—from agencies and departments regulating financial markets, competition policy, environmental protection, agriculture, and all the other domains of the modern regulatory state.² Finances also tell the tale: foreign affairs budgets for regulatory agencies have increased dramatically across the board, even as the State Department’s budget has shrunk.³

Globalization is generally thought of in terms of corporations more than courts, global markets more than global justice. Yet judges around the world are talking to one another: exchanging opinions, meeting face to face in seminars and judicial organizations, and even negotiating with one another over the outcome of specific cases. The Federal Judicial Conference established a Committee on International Judicial Relations in 1993 to conduct a wide variety of exchanges and training programs with foreign courts. The U.S. Supreme Court has regular summits with its counterpart in the European Union, the ECJ; it has also visited the House of...

Recall Atlas and his globe at Rockefeller Center. A disaggregated world order would be a world latticed by countless government networks. In form, these networks would include both horizontal and vertical networks. In function, they would include networks for collecting and sharing information of all kinds, enforcement cooperation, technical assistance and training, as well as policy coordination and rule harmonization. In scope, they would be bilateral, plurilateral, regional, and global.

A search for the architects of world order is a Pogo-like quest: they are us. No hypothetical leaders or experts sit outside the world on some Archimedean platform, able to design and implement new global structures. Rather, heads of state, ministers, judges, legislators, heads of international organizations, civic and corporate leaders, professors, and pundits all make the choices and participate in the processes that design a blueprint of world order at any given moment and give it continually evolving substance.