World federalism an option?

Are such organizations as the World Federalist Movement and its various national affiliates the wave of the future or are they the nostalgic vestiges of an obsolescent idealism? Here is the WFM's self-description:

The World Federalist Movement (WFM) is an international citizen's movement working for justice, peace, and sustainable prosperity. We call for an end to the rule of force, through a world governed by law, based on strengthened and democratized world institutions. We are inspired by the democratic principles of federalism.

Few are likely aware that John B. Anderson, one-time third-party presidential aspirant in 1980 and long-time member of the House of Representatives from my home state of Illinois, is a world federalist. Anderson is a self-described evangelical Christian who was well known in this community in the 1960s and '70s. He is (or at least was) president of the World Federalist Association in the US, now called Citizens for Global Solutions. Here is Anderson on his vision for the future:

Humankind's best guarantee of peace is a legal system which provides for the resolution of the disputes that will inevitably arise in human society. Resolution by peaceful methods that renounce the use of force as a substitute for reason will contribute to the acceptance of the rule of law as an inescapable paradigm. Peace must be acknowledged as a human right which if violated by nations or by individuals will be upheld and protected by judicial process. No ruler or national leader however described should by claim of state sovereignty be able to subvert the principles of accountability to clearly established legal principles through a democratic process based on an equitable and fair and democratic form of government. I further believe that it is through a democratic world federation equipped with adequate authority to deal with truly supra-national questions that our best hopes for a peaceful and secure future reside.

Needless to say, Anderson's is a minority viewpoing among his compatriots, much less his co-religionists.

My own view is that the movement towards the adoption of effective international legal principles is a needed one, even as the notion of a global federation is almost certainly a nonstarter. Hannah Arendt once said that freedom, wherever it has existed as a living reality, is always spatially limited. Democracy on a global scale is more likely to be an empty abstraction than an effective political framework. Moreover, I become immediately suspicious when I hear people contrast the rule of law and the exercise of force. After all, the very efficacy of law rests on the legitimate possession of forceful means.

The reformational school of political theorizing associated with Kuyper and Dooyeweerd I have found extremely fruitful for understanding at least domestic politics. Yet followers of this approach have done little in the way of fleshing out a biblical, creational understanding of international politics. As there is much work to be done in this area, I have been steering my own better students in this direction. God grant that perhaps fifty years from now they and others will have given us more of substance to work with.