This evening I met an English academic, Marc Corner, who teaches in the Department of International Studies at HUB University Brussels and who has recently published a book entitled The Binding of Nations  From European Union to World Union. Corner’s basic thesis is that the European integration model has undeniably worked and that its basic methodology – limited pooling of sovereignty, incremental progress, learning by doing, enlightened self-interest, starting with a limited number of countries – could and maybe should be applied on a world scale, starting with the issue of food security. I was very much interested to hear Corner elaborating on this necessary ‘Copernican revolution’. As I pointed out to him, a lot of federalist thinking during the 1939-45 war considered the possibility of a world federation before turning to a European experiment. To many of those theorists Europe was a laboratory – just a first step. Consider, for example, what William Beveridge (yes, the father of the welfare state) wrote in his 1940 Peace by Federation? (Federal Tracts N° 1, Federal Union, London): ‘Limitation of area is essential; federalism is a strong remedy for a virulent discorder; it is not a healing lotion that can be sprayed over the world. World federation is for the millenium.’